Operationalising Semantic Interoperability for Cross-domain Discovery with LUMIS

Significant heterogeneity in metadata schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies hinders the discovery, reuse, and integration of European environmental data infrastructures across national and disciplinary boundaries. Recent initiatives have identified semantic interoperability as a vital enabler of FAIR data flows between infrastructures, paving the way for sophisticated, AI-driven, large-scale analyses.

Powered by OntoPortal technology, EarthPortal is a specialised catalogue of semantic resources (ontologies, thesauri and controlled vocabularies) for Earth and environmental sciences. It provides navigation, multi-ontology searching, mapping management, text annotation and recommendation services via web interfaces and REST APIs. These support data catalogues and repositories in an interoperable way.

EOSC LUMEN builds an interoperable discovery ecosystem across multiple domains (including Earth System Science, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Mathematics) to enable cross-platform search and meaningful reuse across communities. Rather than focusing only on metadata aggregation, LUMEN targets the practical enablers of interoperability that make resources discoverable and machine-actionable across infrastructures.

LUMIS (LUMEN Infrastructure for Semantics) is the shared semantic layer of LUMEN. It supports the end-to-end lifecycle of semantic artefacts (ontologies and controlled vocabularies, including SKOS resources) from scoping and requirements to implementation, publication and long-term maintenance. LUMIS focuses on governance, provenance, versioning and quality checks, while adopting an integration-first strategy: it connects and orchestrates established community tools (deployed services and/or API-based components) into coherent workflows, so that semantic resources can be created, aligned, validated and delivered in reusable forms for discovery platforms.

Integrating EarthPortal into LUMIS links a domain-specific semantic catalogue to a cross-domain discovery ecosystem. This enables repositories to annotate metadata using EarthPortal resources, while making use of LUMIS’s lifecycle-driven workflows and FAIR-aligned governance and quality checks.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate how integrating EarthPortal into the LUMIS platform supports more consistent semantic interoperability and FAIR-aligned practices across European Earth System Science infrastructures. We will showcase practical data workflows to enhance interdisciplinary research.