A Terminology Service Supporting Semantic Annotation, Integration, Discovery and Analysis of Interdisciplinary Research Data

Abstract

Research has become more data-intensive over the last few decades. Sharing research data is often a challenge, especially for interdisciplinary collaborative projects. One primary goal of a research infrastructure for data management should be to enable efficient data discovery and integration of heterogeneous data. In order to enable such interoperability, a lot of effort has been undertaken by scientists to develop standards and characterize their domain knowledge in the form of taxonomies and formal ontologies. However, these knowledge models are often disconnected and distributed. The work presented here provides a promising approach for integrating and harmonizing terminological resources to serve as a backbone for a platform. The component developed, called the GFBio Terminology Service, acts as a semantic platform for access, development and reasoning over internally and externally maintained terminological resources within the biological and environmental domain. We highlight the utility of the Terminology Service by practical use cases of semantically enhanced components. We show how the Terminology Service enables applications to add meaning to their data by giving access to the knowledge that can be derived from the terminologies and data annotated by them.