Soil vocabularies and Open 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.

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.

ISRIC - World Soil Information has a mandate to serve the international community as custodian of global soil information and to increase awareness and understanding of the role of soils in major global issues. To adapt to the current demand for soil information, ISRIC is updating its enterprise data management system, including procedures for registering acquired data, such as lineage, versioning, quality assessment, and control. Data can be submitted, queried, and analysed using a growing range of web-based services —ultimately aiming at full and open exchange of data, metadata, and products— through the ICSU-accredited World Data Centre for Soils.

2010

This digitized and online accessible soil information system will allow policy makers, planners and experts to overcome some of the shortfalls of data availability to address the old challenges of food production and food security and plan for new challenges of climate change and accelerated natural resources degradation.

Data Science Journal, 2013

ISRIC -World Soil Information has a mandate to serve the international community as custodian of global soil information and to increase awareness and understanding of the role soils in major global issues. To adapt to the current demand for soil information, ISRIC is updating its enterprise data management system, including procedures for registering acquired data such as lineage, versioning, quality assessment and control. Data can be submitted, queried and analysed using a growing range of web-based services -ultimately aiming at full and open exchange of data, metadata and products-through the ICSU-accredited World Data Centre for Soils.

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

Earth System Science Data Discussions, 2016

The aim of the World Soil Information Service (WoSIS) is to serve quality-assessed, georeferenced soil data (point, polygon, and grid) to the international community upon their standardisation and harmonisation. So far, the focus has been on developing procedures for legacy point data, with special attention for the selection of soil analytical and physical properties considered in the GlobalSoilMap specifications (e.g. organic carbon, soil pH, soil texture (sand, silt, and clay), coarse fragments (< 2mm), cation exchange capacity, electrical conductivity, bulk density, and water holding capacity). Profile data managed in WoSIS were contributed by a wide range of soil data providers; the data have been described, sampled, and analysed according to methods and standards in use in the originating countries. Hence, special attention was paid to measures for soil data quality and the standardisation of soil property definitions, soil property values, and soil analytical method descriptions. The present version of WoSIS contains some 118,400 unique 'shared' soil profiles of which over 96,000 are georeferenced within defined limits. In total, this corresponds with over 31 million soil records, of which some 20% have so far been quality-assessed and standardized using the procedures discussed in this paper. The number of measured data for each property varies between profiles and with depth, generally depending on the purpose of the initial studies. Overall, the data lineage strongly determined which data could be standardized with acceptable confidence (as flagged in the database). The publically available data-WoSIS snapshot of July 2016-are persistently accessible from ISRIC WDC-Soils through http:\\dx.doi.org\10.17027\isric-wdcsoils.20160003. 1 Introduction Soil is an important provider of ecosystem services (UNEP, 2012; MEA, 2005). Yet this natural resource, considered to be non-renewable on a human life span, is being threatened (FAO and ITPS, 2015; UNEP, 2014). Worldwide, professionals, scientists, "decision makers and managers must have access to the information they need, when they need it, and in a format they can use" (GEO, 2010). Large numbers of consistent soil profile data of known provenance (lineage) are needed to accurately model and map the status of the world's soil resources at increasingly detailed resolutions (Leenaars et al., 2014;

(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/).

2013