In order to realise the convergence of vocabulary at a technical level, it is necessary to identify the shared concepts in various standards and specifications that currently govern the handling of data and tools in the environmental sciences. Open Information Linking for Environmental RIs (OIL-E) is a semantic linking framework being developed to help perform this challenging task based on the core concepts of the ENVRI reference model.

The reference model uses five viewpoints to address the requirements of RIs. OIL-E will link concepts used in a variety of different standards and specifications to the reference model as a means to harmonise technical developments in RIs.

Objectives

The purpose of OIL-E is to provide a framework by which the semantics of different controlled vocabularies can be studied in order to allow translation and reasoning over heterogeneous datasets.

  • Want to be able to compare different schemas, and identify commonalities and gaps.
  • Also want to be able to build generic systems using existing and future technologies.

OIL-E encodes the vocabulary of the ENVRI reference model for describing research infrastructure from each of the ODP viewpoints.

The linking component of OIL-E glues concepts both inside ENVRI-RM and between ENVRI-RM and external concepts belonging to outside vocabularies. The ENVRI-RM ontology only contains a limited set of vocabularies derived from common functionality and patterns, so linking ENVRI-RM with external RI-specific concepts will enable RI-specific extensions to the ENVRI-RM vocabulary. Similarly, linking ENVRI-RM with external vocabularies provides bridge between those vocabularies and ENVRI-RM, and indirectly between the vocabularies themselves. Notably, the internal correspondences between different ENVRI-RM viewpoints (enterprise, information, etc.) can potentially be used to indirectly link external vocabularies of quite different foci (data, services, infrastructure, etc.).

The OIL-E ontologies can be found online at http://oil-e.net/ontology/.

Relation to ENVRIplus

Within the ENVRIplus project, Task 5.3 is concerned with the development and expansion of OIL-E, both in order to mirror developments in the ENVRI reference model, and to establish links with selected standards for RI specification, geospatial metadata and research data annotation.