Infrastructure-driven solutions to strengthen semantic interoperability in ecology
Cristina Di Muri · Semantic Interoperability and Standards Infrastructure
The short versionA federated terminology service over 28 catalogs plus community alignments tackles the fragmentation of ecological vocabularies.
What this was about
Cristina Di Muri presents LifeWatch services for semantic interoperability. EcoPortal, part of the OntoPortal Alliance and its federation, catalogues ecological semantic artefacts, integrates VocBench for collaborative editing, and offers FAIR assessment, annotator and recommender tools. Because semantic artefacts are scattered over many catalogs with redundancies, version mismatches, poor metadata and little use in annotation, they built a terminology service that federates search across 28 catalogs via 20 connectors, with discovery, version monitoring and embeddable search/annotation widgets, and produced over 3,000 new alignments across six artefacts using semi-automated tools.
Why it matters. Semantic artefacts underpin FAIR data, but their fragmentation undermines interoperability; single-point access and alignments make them usable.
In the room
- Semantic artefacts: ontologies, thesauri, glossaries and controlled vocabularies in SKOS, OWL, RDFS.
- EcoPortal manages artefacts across their life cycle, with VocBench editing, FAIR assessment, annotator and recommender.
- EcoPortal is part of the OntoPortal Alliance federation offering federated search and upcoming federated API across four catalogs.
- Problems: many catalogs and technologies, redundant and unaligned vocabularies, divergent versions, missing metadata, underuse in annotation.
- Terminology service: federated search over 28 catalogs via 20 configurable connectors, discovery alerts and version monitoring.
- Search and annotation widgets tested in three metadata management systems.
- Over 3,000 new alignments across six semantic artefacts via semi-automated tools.
Notable moments
Transcript
Automatically generated captions can contain mistakes, especially in names and technical terms. Times are relative to the room recording.
Read the transcript ↓
Related talks.
The LIB Open Knowledge Space: A semantic architecture for FAIR, CLEAR, and AI-ready biodiversity knowledge
Knowledge can enter the LIB Open Knowledge Space as natural language immediately and be formalised step by step, so content becomes FAIR, CLEAR and AI-ready incrementally.
Enabling machine-readable access to biodiversity data through federated semantic querying
Distribute the data, not the infrastructure: cloud Parquet plus OBDA query rewriting gives a virtual Darwin Core knowledge graph without duplicating data into RDF.
Beyond Data Integration: Ecological and Semantic Interoperability in Coastal Digital Twins
Coastal digital twins expose a long list of unresolved land-sea interoperability gaps, from vertical datums and shifting shorelines to missing cross-domain ontologies.