D3.2 Vocabulary Discovery Services
The aim of this deliverable is to describe the improved functionality available from the NERCNERC
National Environment Research Council Vocabulary Server (NVS) in support of the CLIPC project. The CLIPC portal aims to deliver a data service layer across a range of datasets, which are produced by different science communities. These different science communities mark up their data using discipline specific vocabularies. The same applies to the employed vocabulary to populate metadatametadata
Information about meteorological and climatological data concerning how and when they were measured, their quality, known problems and other characteristics. fiels due to the varying maturity of the communities regarding metadata models.
The NVS already supports interoperability across a number of environmental communities; the marine community with the SeaDataNet (SDN) and Marine Environmental Data Information Network (MEDIN) vocabularies, and also the ClimateClimate
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system. and Forecast community by hosting the Climate and Forecast Standard Names. CLIPC Deliverable 5.2 has identified metadata and controlled vocabularies for data, quality control and uncertainties in Earth Observation data. These vocabularies and mappings need to be reliably served and available to the community and the NVS is to be used to take on this responsibility for the CLIPC project.
CLIPC has funded improvements to the NVS Editor allowing authorized users to maintain vocabularies (insert, modify or deprecate terms) through a web form, either on a term by term basis or through a bulk upload feature. Before the recent development activity the NVS allowed for machine to machine interoperability through 3 mechanisms: RDF restful API, SOAP API and a SPARQL endpoint. A web based search tool (NVS Search) has been built to facilitate direct searches by users from their web browser. This has been built on the NVS SPARQL endpoint. Previously search results were returned as XML. The search results are now delivered with content negotiation, as RDF/XML in the case of machine to machine interactions or as htmlhtml
Hyper Text Mark-up Language to a user’s web browser. The html that is returned allows the user to follow mappings between vocabularies as hyperlinks within the web page or follow hierarchies within concept schemes.
