Southern Ocean Decade & Polar Data Forum Week 2021

Online, 20 - 24 September 2021 An Ocean Of Opportunities

Cryosphere Semantics Harmonization Efforts at ESIP

Ruth E Duerr, Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Gary Berg-Cross, Kai L. Blumberg, Mark Schildhauer, Brandon Whitehead, Nancy Wiegand and Chantelle Verhey

The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) federation, is a community of more than 170 organizations including “USA federal data centers, government research laboratories, research universities, education resource providers, technology developers, and various nonprofit and commercial enterprises” with a vision of “promoting the collection, stewardship and use of Earth science data, information and knowledge that is responsive to societal needs”. Over the years, with the recognition that the role of human and machine actionable semantics, as represented by terminologies in the form of controlled vocabularies, glossaries, thesauri, and ontologies, is becoming increasingly important to these goals, a Semantics Harmonization cluster formed. This group has spent several years grappling with methods for harmonizing existing diverse semantics resources, with cryospheric and polar terminology as its first target. Here we describe the resulting outputs and the leading practices developed and used.