Distinct, alternative forms of geosemantics, whose classification is often ill-defined, emerge in the management of geospatial information. This paper proposes a workflow to identify patterns in the different practices and methods dealing with geoinformation. From a meta-review of the state of the art in geosemantics, this paper first pinpoints “keywords” representing key concepts, challenges, methods, and technologies. Then, we illustrate several case studies, following the categorization into implicit, formal, and powerful (i.e., soft) semantics depending on the kind of their input. Finally, we associate the case studies with the previously identified keywords and compute their similarities in order to ascertain if distinguishing methodologies, techniques, and challenges can be related to the three distinct forms of semantics. The outcomes of the analysis sheds some light on the diverse methods and technologies that are more suited to model and deal with specific forms of geosemantics.

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Biological and Ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (BioEco EOVs) are two cooperative conceptual frameworks which help harmonize and process multi-source marine biodiversity observations into robust indexes, in order to measure progress toward policy conservation goals. Long-term monitoring networks are encouraged to contribute to these frameworks by mobilizing historical times series which are suitable for detecting impacts of management policies. In this paper, we identify specific recommendations for increasing reuse in the EV frameworks of the biodiversity historical data collected and maintained by the Gulf of Venice (GOV) site, i.e., the monitoring facility that is selected as case study in the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy). The recommendations are obtained through a practical approach comprising two phases. In the first phase, a literature review helps extract the guidelines for implementing the principles representing the most recent attempt to unify management of EBV and BioEco EOV data, i.e., Benson’s tenets. In the second phase, we compare the guidelines to the data management practices enacted by the selected monitoring site in order to recommend curation interventions. The outputs of the analysis are discussed in order to verify if the approach and the recommendations are general enough to be replicated in the marine component of monitoring networks to coordinate the LTER data contribution to the EV frameworks.

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