agINFRA work to publish LOD concept schemes for soil data

Standards to describe soil properties are well established, with many ISO specifications and a few international thesauri available for specific applications. Besides, in recent years, the European directive on “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)” has brought together most of the existing standards into a well defined model. However, the adoption of these standards so far has not reached the level of semantic interoperability, defined in the paper, which would facilitate the building of data services that reuse and combine data from different sources. This paper reviews standards for describing soil data and reports on the work done withinthe EC funded agINFRA project to apply Linked Data technologies to existing standards anddata in order to improve the interoperability of soil datasets. The main result of this work istwofold. First, an RDF vocabulary for soil concepts based on the UML INSPIRE model waspublished. Second, a KOS (Knowledge Organization System) for soil data was publishedand mapped to existing relevant KOS, based on the analysis of the SISI database of theCREA of Italy. This work also has a methodological value, in that it proposes and appliesa methodology to standardize metadata used in local scientific databases, a very commonsituation in the scientific domain. Finally, this work aims at contributing towards a wideradoption of the INSPIRE directive, by providing an RDF version of it.

(European Community) Programme eContentplus ECP_2008_GEO_318004, 2012

Project: "Assessment and strategic development of INSPIRE compliant Geodata-Services for European Soil Data (GS Soil)" (Co-funded by the community programme eContentplus ECP_2008_GEO_318004). The project GS Soil aimed at establishing a European network to improve the access to spatial soil data for public sector bodies, private companies and citizens. The project considered aspects of data organisation, data harmonisation as well as semantic and technical interoperability in order to produce seamless geospatial soil information and to improve the data access for a wider community of different user groups. The structural specification for the description and harmonisation of spatial soil data within Europe as well as the operation of a corresponding Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) were main objectives of the GS Soil consortium. Technical and syntactic interoperability have been ensured by the use of open standards such as published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)and the INSPIRE Specifications on Network Services. As a result, soil data providers offer their data via OGC compliant Web Feature Services (WFS)or Web Map Services (WMS), ensuring that the GS portal and other client systems are capable of accessing and displaying the distributed data. A generic application schema for soil data serves as a backbone for data interoperability. Using a number of international OGC and other standards the partners established and operated a network of services for spatial datasets and metadata. This network includes distributed services for data transformation, discovery, view and best practice for download, and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The central result of the project is the GS Soil portal (http://www.gssoil-portal.eu/).

INSPIRE provides the framework for the establishment of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure. The cross-border use and applicability of data requires that specific standards and rules are fulfilled by data providers. Such rules are currently being developed as data specifications. Soil as a theme in the INSPIRE annex III is included in this process, and was selected as the target theme for the EU best practice network GS SOIL ”Assessment and strategic development of INSPIRE compliant Geodata-Services for European soil data”. The project contributes to the harmonization and provision of interoperable soil geodata in Europe. The main deliverable of the project is the web portal http://gssoil-portal.eu/, which provides information, data management tools and links to data sources. Examples are the soil specific multilingual thesaurus, a metadata editor and catalogue service, provision of WMS and prototype WFS.

The Soil Geographical Database of Europe (SGDBE) corresponds to geographical scale 1: 1,000,000 and is part of the European Soil Information System (EUSIS). It is developed by collaborative efforts of all the European Union and neighboring countries. This database represents diversity and spatial variability of the soils. The methodology used to differentiate and name the main soil types is based on the terminology of the United Nations

2011

Abstract Publishing environmental data to Linked Open Data (LOD) requires environmental data providers to adopt a set of universally recognized linked data principles. These principles enable syntactic integration of the linked data regardless of the data publisher and origin. However, these principles do not provide any mechanism for semantic integration and interoperability of the linked data.

The agINFRA project focuses on the production of interoperable data in agriculture, starting from the vocabularies and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) used to describe and classify them. In this paper we report on our first steps in the direction of publishing agricultural Linked Open Data (LOD), focusing in particular on germplasm data and soil data, which are still widely missing from the LOD landscape, seemingly because information managers in this field are still not very familiar with LOD practices.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 544, 2015

The movement to share data has been on the rise in the last decade and lately in the agricultural domain. Similarly platforms for publishing scientific and sta-tistical datasets have sprouted and have improved visibility and availability of datasets. Yet there are still constraints in making datasets discoverable and re-usable. Commonly agreed semantics, authority lists to index datasets and stand-ard formats and protocols to expose data are now essential. This paper explains how the CIARD RING provides a global linked data catalog of datasets for ag-riculture. The first part of this paper will describe the Linked Data layer of the CIARD RING focusing on the data model, semantics used and the CIARD RING LOD publication. The second part will provide examples of re-use of da-ta from the RING. The paper concludes by describing the future steps in the de-velopment of the CIARD RING.

2011

Publishing agro-environmental resources to a linked open data (LOD) cloud requires publishers to adopt a set of universally recognized linked data principles. These principles, along with semantic annotations based on shared domain ontologies can ensure the semantic integration of agro-environmental resources. In this paper we present a resource-publishing system, called AGROPub, that we developed to aid agro-environmental resource providers to annotate, publish and integrate their resources to LOD.

2012

2024

Numerous geographic data on peatland exist but definitions vary, and the correspondent classes are often neither harmonized nor interoperable. This hinders the efforts to employ the available national datasets on peatlands and wetlands for policy monitoring and reporting. The existing meta-languages, such as ISO-Land Cover Meta Language (LCML) and EAGLE, offer the possibility to “deconstruct” the relevant nomenclatures in an object-oriented manner, allowing the comparability and interoperable use of related information. The complex nature of peatlands calls for a dedicated and structured vocabulary of keywords and terms, comprising the biotic substrate and the soil. In the SEPLA project, a semantic meta-model has been developed, combining the hierarchical ontology of the LCML with the matrix structure of the EAGLE model. The necessary elements were provided to describe peatland bio-physical characteristics, while representing the definitions in a concise and user-friendly manner (semantic passports). The proposed semantic meta-model is innovative as it enables the documentation of the spatial distribution of peatland characteristics, considering also their temporal dimension, their intrinsic relation with land use, and the soil. It has been successfully implemented for the translation of the national peatland nomenclature into common land categories relevant for reporting under LULUCF regulation, as part of the EU Climate Law.