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

Preferred presentation format: Poster 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. 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. 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. 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：海报。UNAVCO是一家由大学治理的非营利性联盟，依托大地测量学（geodesy）推动地球科学研究与教育事业发展。我们计划利用并拓展VIVO，以实现人员、数据与仪器设备之间关联关系的发现。UNAVCO案例研究是EarthCollab项目的组成部分，该项目由美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）下属的地球立方计划（EarthCube Program）资助，属于构建模块资助项目。EarthCollab项目还包含一个在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）开展的互补案例研究。相较于自主开发全新应用程序，VIVO是极具吸引力的替代方案：VIVO为开源软件，可针对我们的应用场景进行定制改造，且拥有活跃的落地实施与开发社区。VIVO最初主要被用作面向人员的语义画像应用程序，但作为可扩展的语义框架，它同样可用于为数据集与仪器设备生成语义画像。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）已通过改造后的VIVO实例来管理并展示数据集。UNAVCO拥有种类繁多的仪器设备，包括高精度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。当前尚无单一的本体论（ontology）能够充分描述我们的仪器装备库，以及这些仪器所产生的海量实时与归档数据。我们计划通过在可行范围内融入SWEET、DCAT及GCIS等现有本体论的部分内容，来拓展VIVO本体论对数据集与仪器设备的有限支持能力。UNAVCO是一家大地测量研究设施，为美国及海外数百家机构的外部合作研究者提供研究支持。我们在野外部署并维护着超过2000台仪器设备。此外，我们还提供数据托管与归档服务、数据服务，已开始为数据颁发数字对象标识符（Digital Object Identifier, DOI），并为外部研究者提供仪器与数据相关支持。我们希望借助VIVO展示UNAVCO合作研究者的增强版实时信息，同时无需承担额外的责任与资源投入——不必再为他们的动态信息（如职位头衔与联系方式）搭建又一个标准数据库存储系统。我们将定期采集合作研究者所在机构或第三方平台（如开放研究者与贡献者身份（Open Researcher and Contributor ID, 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。我们在将数据集与发表文献数据导入VIVO方面已取得显著进展。接下来，我们将敲定一套适用于仪器与数据集元数据的本体论术语。我们还将开发一套概念验证实施方案，用于实现不同VIVO实例间的数据共享。在建立起可持续的数据采集方法后，我们将开发或适配相关扩展功能，以提升VIVO内地球科学专属信息的可发现性。