Enhancing Semantic Interoperability in Earth System Sciences: TheRole of EarthPortal

The study of the Earth system involves a wide range of disciplines that are increasingly collaborate to address global challenges like climate change. In France, Data Terra, the national e-infrastructure supports this effort by managing data for five key Earth system components: Ocean, Atmosphere, Solid Earth, Continental Surface, and Biodiversity. Alongside distributed infrastructure services, Data Terra provides discovery, access, and dissemination tools to enable researchers to effectively conduct their scientific investigations. Among these resources, EarthPortal, a FAIR-compliant semantic artefact catalogue, promotes the use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies, enhancing semantic interoperability across Earth sciences disciplines.

Developed within the EOSC FAIR-IMPACT project using OntoPortal technology, EarthPortal aligns with European and national recommendations for sharing and reusing semantic artefacts in interdisciplinary research contexts. EarthPortal is a thematic catalogue and semantic repository specifically tailored for Earth and environmental sciences, hosting artefacts like SKOS-controlled vocabularies and OWL ontologies, organized into categories and thematic groups with filtering options. Beyond providing access to semantic artefacts, EarthPortal offers advanced tools to support third-party applications. Key functionalities include (i) the annotator, which suggests relevant terms based on textual or keyword input ; (ii) the recommender, which identifies pertinent semantic artefacts corresponding to the provided input ; and (iii) the mappings tool, which generates, stores, and visualizes relationships between different semantic artefacts. Through its REST API, EarthPortal facilitates seamless integration with external applications, enabling users to access semantic artefacts and leverage these tools directly within their workflows.

This presentation highlights EarthPortal’s functionalities including its user interface and API capabilities. Using a concrete application example, we will demonstrate how the tool enhances the semantic interoperability of data. Specifically, we will illustrate the integration of EarthPortal with EaSy Data, the French data repository for Earth and environmental sciences. This connection enriches metadata with semantic annotations, improving discoverability and user experience.

Additionally, we will explore new developments, including the federation of EarthPortal with other OntoPortal Alliance platforms (e.g., BiodivPortal, AgroPortal) to enable cross-domain interoperability by facilitating the discovery of semantic artefacts across domains, and providing users with a unified interface to access diverse thematic resources. Finally, we will outline future developments, including the creation of a generic connector for the GeoNetwork catalogue, which will allow the direct use of EarthPortal's semantic artefacts and tools, enhancing metadata editing, search functionalities and data harvesting processes.