A common controlled vocabulary was built, within EnvEurope project, as the base for semantic integration of the data resulting from long term ecological research and monitoring in Europe. It is based on existing thesauri, extended according to further needs of LTER Europe.

The general aim of EnvThes is to:

• provide thematic terms for categorizing LTER information made available via EnvEurope services and clients.

• support establishment, finding and understanding LTER data and LTER metadata related information.

• enable semantic interoperability of data and metadata within the EnvEurope project in general and its services and clients in particular.

USE CASES

Use case1: discovery and lookup services

Discovery and lookup services need keys to search for metadata and data. Those keys shall not be entered as free text, since differing spellings, heterogeneous wordings, synonyms and homonyms this would create a high barrier for a common lookup of data sets. Instead of providing free text descriptions or terms, the keys shall be selected out of a list provided by EnvThes. Thus harmonised keys can later on be used by the data user to search for data needed.

Use case2: use of correct vocabulary in daily work

No matter whether the work is done using a common software or editing a word document or spreadsheet or what so ever, it is useful to rely on a common controlled vocabulary. EnvThes shall allow for looking up the correct wording for special concepts in different European languages.

The final EnvThes product will be available soon.

For further details please have a look on this link.