EnvThs: a controlled vocabulary service application for environmental data

Abstract

In this paper we present a controlled vocabulary service application (CVSA) that we primarily developed in semantic support for the Environmental Data Store (EDS), but also as an access point for other controlled vocabularies that are commonly used in the environmental field. We use a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) implementation for the representation of the controlled vocabularies associated with the EDS in addition to those others that we placed side by side. The EDS controlled vocabularies were created as an amalgamation of eight commonly used vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies in the geoscience/environmental informatics community. From these, ten top concepts were selected or defined as the base of our classification system. We deploy the TemaTres, implementation of SKOS which is an open-source, web –based thesaurus management package to create and manage our EDS vocabularies. TemaTresView and VisualVocabulary tools that work well with TemaTres are also integrated in the application to provide tree view and graphical view of the vocabulary structure. The open source edition of Virtuoso Universal Server is used to provide a Web interface in support of SPARQL queries against the EDS controlled vocabularies. Replicas of some of the key vocabularies commonly used in the community are also maintained as part of the application, such as the General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), and the NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Standard Names. The application has been deployed as an elementary and experimental prototype that can be accessed at http://edscvs.ccny.cuny.edu .