Curating socio-environmental science software, hardware, and data with semantic web technologies: the experience of the SEEKCommons project

In this presentation we describe the research work we are conducting in the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) project to develop commons-based technologies, such as Free and Open Source software, hardware, and data, to advance collaborative research. In particular, we describe our work on the development of a semantic web data pipeline—a structured framework for guiding a series of processes programmatically defined and automated (Stoudt et al. 2021)—to incorporate socio-environmental research projects and open resources into Wikidata, an open graph database for managing semantic information collaboratively (Mietchen et al., 2015). In addition to the description of the web technologies we have designed and adapted to store, retrieve, visualize, and disseminate semantic data, we also discuss the sociotechnical challenges and benefits of our approach for advancing the creation of open technologies for collaborative research. Our approach, we conclude, consists in enriching web data (Latzko-Toth et al., 2016) with relational knowledge of social, technical, and environmental issues, but also through the treatment of ethical questions concerning the provenance of research data and their communities of origin—which have been often historically erased from scientific records.