Leveraging VIVO to connect people, instruments, and data semantically in the geosciences: The UNAVCO case study

Preferred presentation format: Poster <br><br>UNAVCO is a non-profit university-governed consortium that facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy. We plan to leverage and extend VIVO to enable the discovery of connections between people, data, and instrumentation. The UNAVCO case study is part of EarthCollab, a building block grant funded through the EarthCube Program at the National Science Foundation. The EarthCollab project includes a complementary case study at NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL). VIVO provides an attractive alternative to developing a new application in-house. VIVO is open source, can be modified to suit our use case, and has an active implementation and development community. <br><br>VIVO has primarily been utilized as a semantic profiling application for people. As an extendable semantic framework, however, it can be used to profile datasets and instruments. Notably, the Deep Carbon Observatory and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) have used modified implementations of VIVO to manage and display datasets. UNAVCO utilizes a wide variety of instrumentation, such as high precision GPS receivers, terrestrial laser scanning instruments, borehole strainmeters and other geodetic tools. No single existing ontology can describe our instrument arsenal or the large amounts of real time and archived data they produce adequately. We plan to extend the VIVO ontology’s limited support for datasets and instrumentation by incorporating parts of existing ontologies such as SWEET, DCAT, and GCIS, whenever possible. <br><br>UNAVCO is a geodetic facility that supports the research of external collaborators located at hundreds of institutions in the U.S. and abroad. We maintain over 2,000 instruments in the field. Additionally, we host and archive data, provide data services, have begun minting data DOIs, and offer instrument and data support to external researchers. We wish to use VIVO to display enhanced, up-to-date information about UNAVCO collaborators without the responsibility and resource commitment of being yet another canonical database store for their dynamic information, such as position titles and contact details. We will periodically ingest semantic data hosted at their home institution or at a third party (e.g. ORCID), which will be connected to our locally ingested information on datasets and instruments. <br><br>We have made significant progress ingesting datasets and publication data into VIVO. Next, we will finalize a set of ontological terms for instrument and dataset metadata. We will also develop a proof of concept implementation for sharing data between VIVO instances. Following the establishment of sustainable ingest methods, we will develop or adapt extensions to enhance discoverability of geoscience-specific information within VIVO.

首选展示格式：Poster<br><br>UNAVCO是一家由大学治理的非营利性联盟，致力于借助大地测量技术（geodesy）推动地球科学研究与教育事业。我们计划依托并扩展VIVO平台，以实现人员、数据与仪器之间的关联发现。本次UNAVCO案例研究是EarthCollab项目的组成部分，该项目是由美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）地球立方计划（EarthCube Program）资助的基础构建模块项目。EarthCollab项目还包含美国国家大气研究中心（National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR）地球观测实验室（Earth Observing Laboratory, EOL）的配套案例研究。相较于自主开发全新应用，VIVO是极具吸引力的替代方案：它属于开源项目，可针对我们的使用场景进行定制改造，且拥有活跃的实施与开发社区。<br><br>VIVO最初主要被用作人员语义画像应用。不过作为可扩展的语义框架，它同样可用于数据集与仪器的语义画像。值得注意的是，深碳观测站（Deep Carbon Observatory）与大气与空间物理实验室（Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, LASP）已采用改造后的VIVO实例来管理并展示数据集。UNAVCO拥有种类繁多的仪器设备，例如高精度GPS接收机、地面激光扫描仪器、钻孔应变仪及其他大地测量工具。目前尚无单一现有本体（ontology）能够充分描述我们的仪器库，或是这些仪器产生的海量实时与归档数据。因此我们计划通过整合现有本体（如SWEET、DCAT与GCIS）的相关部分，扩展VIVO本体对数据集与仪器的有限支持能力。<br><br>UNAVCO是一家大地测量设施，为美国及海外数百家机构的外部合作者提供研究支持。我们在野外部署了超过2000台仪器。此外，我们还负责数据的托管与归档、提供数据服务，已开始为数据生成数字对象标识符（Digital Object Identifier, DOI），并为外部研究人员提供仪器与数据相关支持。我们希望借助VIVO展示UNAVCO合作者的完善且实时的信息，同时无需承担额外的责任与资源投入——不必为他们的动态信息（如职位头衔与联系方式）构建专门的权威数据库存储系统。我们将定期采集其所属机构或第三方（例如ORCID）托管的语义数据，并将这些数据与我们本地采集的数据集及仪器信息进行关联。<br><br>目前我们已在将数据集与发表论文数据导入VIVO方面取得了显著进展。接下来，我们将敲定一套用于仪器与数据集元数据的本体术语集。我们还将开发用于在VIVO实例之间共享数据的概念验证（proof of concept）实现方案。在建立可持续的导入方法之后，我们将开发或适配相关扩展功能，以提升VIVO内地球科学特定信息的可发现性。