Weaving a Knowledge Network for Deep Carbon Science

Abstract

Geoscience researchers are increasingly dependent on informatics and the Web to conduct their research. Geoscience is one of the first domains that take lead in initiatives such as open data, open code, open access, and open collections, which comprise key topics of Open Science in academia. The meaning of being open can be understood at two levels. The lower level is to make data, code, sample collections, and publications, etc., freely accessible online and allow reuse, modification, and sharing. The higher level is the annotation and connection between those resources to establish a network for collaborative scientific research. In the data science component of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), we have leveraged state-of-the-art information technologies and existing online resources to deploy a web portal for the over 1,000 researchers in the DCO community. An initial aim of the portal is to keep track of all research and outputs related to the DCO community. Further, we intend for the portal to establish a knowledge network, which supports various stages of an open scientific process within and beyond the DCO community. Annotation and linking are the key characteristics of the knowledge network. Not only are key assets, including DCO data and methods, published in an open and inter-linked fashion, but the people, organizations, groups, grants, projects, samples, field sites, instruments, software programs, activities, meetings, etc., are recorded and connected to each other through relationships based on well-defined, formal conceptual models. The network promotes collaboration among DCO participants, improves the openness and reproducibility of carbon-related research, facilitates accreditation to resource contributors, and eventually stimulates new ideas and findings in deep carbon-related studies.

Semantics all the way down: the Semantic Web and open science in big earth data

“…Thus, the data values themselves are not in the Linked Data cloud, but enough information about the data values is part of the Linked Data cloud that a semantically enabled application can retrieve the data, irrespective of how it is stored, and make immediate use of it. This is somewhat analogous to the approaches taken by (Krisnadhi et al, 2015;Ma et al, 2017;McGuinness et al, 2007;Narock et al, 2014). However, our approach differs by its subsequent use of individual measurements and connection to a semantically enabled open source community developed software framework.…”

“…Examples of semantically enabled search and retrieval systems in the Earth sciences include the Deep Carbon Observatory (Ma et al, 2017), the OceanLink project (Narock et al, 2014) and its successor GeoLink (Krisnadhi et al, 2015), and the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (McGuinness et al, 2007). These systems have provided great benefit to their respective science communities by semantically modeling domain concepts and the relationships between them.…”

“…This provenance information can be linked back to data publishers showing how the data were used and can also lead to easier reproducibility of scientific results. Ma et al (2017) This extension of the Semantic Web's usage in the geosciences is not without challenges. Using the aforementioned C. finmarchicus example, we'll present the challenges involved and present potential solutions for each step.…”

“…Corporations, governments, Wikipedia, social networking sites, and various academic communities have all produced LOD (Hogan et al, 2011) and it is emerging as a prominent means of publishing geoscience metadata (see for example Krisnadhi et al, 2015;Ma et al, 2017;Narock et al, 2014) There is also an emergence in the need to publish multi-dimensional data values, such as statistics, on this same "Web of Data. " These data values become more useful and interoperable when they are published in such a way that they can be linked to related datasets and concepts.…”

The History and Future of Data Citation in Practice

“…Other approaches use more decentralized, Web-based mechanisms which may allow more adaptability and extensibility (e.g., Ma et al 2017;Parsons & Fox 2018). Work in ESIP and RDA explores how we can use schema.org web markup to identify and link data and repositories.…”