Benefits of Terminologies for Interdisciplinary Research

Our Earth System is a complex and dynamic network involving interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, landmasses, and biosphere. Being cross-disciplinary at its core, research in Earth System Science comprises divergent domains such as Paleontology, Marine Science, Biodiversity Research, Atmospheric Sciences, Molecular Biology or Plate Tectonics. Given the exponential growth of data due to technological developments along with an increased recognition of research data as relevant research output during the last decades, fundamental challenges in terms of interoperability, reproducibility and reuse of scientific information arise. Within the various disciplines, distinct methods and terms for indexing, cataloguing, describing and finding scientific data have been developed, resulting in a large amount of controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies and Thesauri. However, given the semantic heterogeneity across scientific domains (even within the Earth System Sciences), effective utilisation and (re)use of data is impeded while the importance of enhanced and improved interoperability across research areas will increase even further. 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 that may serve the whole Earth System Science Community on national, european and international level. In our presentation we would like to showcase the benefits of Terminologies not only for the Earth System Sciences but also for enhanced interdisciplinary discovery of research output including Social Sciences and Humanities. The inclusion of the human factor in Earth System Science is an essential part of future climate model projections, and the extent to which different tools can contribute to this remains the great challenge of our time. We hope to give at least a starting point for that.