BITS - a Blueprint for Terminologies in Earth System Sciences

The exponential growth of data due to technological developments, combined with the increased recognition of research data as a relevant research output over the last decades, highlights fundamental challenges in terms of interoperability, reproducibility and re-use of scientific information. Research in Earth System Science is at its core cross-disciplinary, encompassing diverse fields such as palaeontology, marine science, biodiversity research, atmospheric sciences and molecular biology. Furthermore, different types of data, such as observations and simulations, and a wide range of data sizes (from climate model output to images of specimens) illustrate the challenges of implementing the I and R in FAIR data principles in particular. Different disciplines have developed their own methods and terms for indexing, cataloguing, describing and retrieving scientific data, resulting in a large number of controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri. However, this volume of disparate semantic artefacts often contains ambiguous, duplicate and inconsistent terms, posing numerous challenges for interoperability and standardisation, particularly for automated data selection. Terminologies can help by enabling researchers and infrastructure providers to realise a machine-processable expression of the information contained in their research data and other scholarly outputs. The BITS project (BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences) aims to address the inadequate implementation of encoding semantics by establishing a terminology service (TS) that can serve the entire Earth System Science (ESS) community at national, European and international level. It is part of the existing terminology service of the TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, which will be maintained on a long-term basis. Within this service, an ESS Collection already contains 40 terminologies relevant to the ESS, with the option to add more. New terminologies for the ESS collection can be suggested at any time via the ESS homepage, and new terms for terminologies hosted on Github can also be suggested and forwarded to the developers of that terminology. The implementation of this TS in two data repositories (World Data Center for Climate at the German Climate Computing Centre and a data collection at Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research) will demonstrate the benefits for two very different use cases: While the WDCC is an international data repository and archive for comprehensive climate data (including climate model output as well as observational data), it provides homogeneous but large data and will use the ESS TS to improve the discoverability of its data search interface. SGN, on the other hand, is an institution with 11 facilities and over 40 million exhibition and research items, dealing with very heterogeneous data and data infrastructures. It will use the ESS TS for automated metadata annotation of physical objects as it builds its digitised data collections (currently 1.521.698 objects in 124 collections). While the WDCC is an international data repository and archive for comprehensive climate data (including climate model output as well as observational data), it provides homogeneous but large data and will use the ESS TS to improve the discoverability of its data search interface. SGN, on the other hand, is an institution with 11 facilities and over 40 million exhibition and research items, dealing with very heterogeneous data and data infrastructures. It will use the ESS TS for automated metadata annotation of physical objects as it builds its digitised data collections (currently 1.521.698 objects in 124 collections). Despite its status as a project, BITS project partners have a notable level of engagement within the research data infrastructure landscape. A major objective is to foster collaboration activities across services and infrastructures: at national level the project outcome will serve as a blueprint for generic services within the German national research data infrastructure NFDI (TS4NFDI, base4NFDI). Within the NFDI4Earth consortia, the Interest Group on FAIR Earth System Science Terminologies (FAIR ESST) has been established, with a remit that includes the monitoring of the BITS Project from a domain-specific perspective. At the European level, BITS collaborates with several EOSC services (e.g. the DTR from FAIRCORE4EOSC for offering terms within the ESS collection as FAIR Digital Objects) and, on an international level, by contributing to the development of domain-specific vocabularies (e.g. CF Conventions, which are crucial - not only - in Earth System Modelling). In our presentation, the general benefits of using terminologies in Earth System Science will be highlighted, with the BITS Project being used as a practical, sustainable, and (hopefully) reusable example.