The EarthCollab project, http://earthcube.org/group/earthcollab, is using semantic web and linked data technology to facilitate the coordination and organization of complex scientific projects and their products. EarthCollab is deploying instances of the VIVO Semantic Web software suite at NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) and UNAVCO. This project is also undertaking software development to add capabilities to the VIVO software suite, both for the benefit of EarthCollab and the wider VIVO community. The first priority has been to develop a prototype approach to exchanging information across VIVO instances. The initial prototype focuses on the use case of a single individual having VIVO profiles at different institutions and explores questions of (a) how the software can support looking up which VIVO instances may have information on a single individual, (b) how information from a VIVO instance can be retrieved, accessed, and displayed within a different VIVO instance without requiring local duplication of the externally retrieved data and (c) how to uniquely identify an individual whose information is present in multiple VIVO instances. Our prototype has demonstrated the ability to retrieve information from an external VIVO instance, and display that information on the profile page of an internal VIVO instance (such as UNAVCO or NCAR EOL).
This poster will present the prototype approach, our next deployment steps, and opportunities to extend semantic data exchanges to additional open-source software platforms. We hope to stimulate discussion within the ESIP community on how geoscience semantic web data stores can exchange information to increase connectivity and reduce redundancy between different systems.
 | Name: Matthew Mayernik Organization(s): National Center for Atmospheric Research |