EarthCube Building Blocks: Collaborative Proposal: Enabling Scientific Collaboration and Discovery through Semantic Connections

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Data, information, ideas, and technologies diffuse through social and organizational networks, if the impediments to their adoption are low and the benefits of new approaches are clear. This project brings together the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), UNAVCO, and Cornell University to understand how to improve the processes of collaboration and resource sharing in the geosciences by demonstrating and encouraging the adoption of structured information systems rooted in common standards. Using two large geoscience research programs as case studies, this effort will demonstrate how semantic web and linked data technology can play an essential role in the coordination and organization of scientific virtual organizations and their products, thereby accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation. The researchers will use a well-developed open source web application as an integrating data layer to expose the informational relationships and organizational collaborations within the case studies. This project will be an exemplar of using linked data to support virtual organizations in the geosciences. These efforts will feed into new tools that leverage linked data to support information and data exchange, and will produce recommendations on engaging user communities in linked data projects. This project will provide insight into how the geosciences can leverage linked data to produce more coherent methods of information and data discovery for large multi-disciplinary projects and virtual organizations. They will use the open source VIVO software application to illustrate how linked data can transform scientific project communication and dissemination via front end discovery based on rich networked metadata. The VIVO platform provides new capabilities for researchers and educators to use structured, interpretable data, permitting direct interlinking of information and data across platforms and projects. The project will structure data into an ontology-based, standard data format (RDF) for re-use, leveraging web identifier and vocabulary structures that have been well developed and widely adopted in the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities.