Evaluation and integration of aligned vocabularies in an Earth Observation Knowledge Base

Information Science typically defines information in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge (Rowley 2007). Generating information and knowledge from data is about understanding and connecting. Earth Observation (EO) data has increased considerably over the last decades, however, access to this data remains difficult for endusers in most domains. As a multitude of heterogeneous data will be made available through the Knowledge Base infrastructure which will be developed within the ERA-PLANET projects, it is essential to ensure high standards of discoverability, accessibility, and interoperability. The design of this infrastructure involves the alignment and integration of a set of semantic resources defining the specific domain. This poster illustrates how the latter is important in order to ensure harmonised access to the vast volume of data produced, turning it into usable information and knowledge, and to guarantee semantic interoperability within the infrastructure. This involves the alignment of existing thematic vocabularies (i.e. glossaries, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies), along with the integration of further domain-specific terminology obtained through a corpus-based approach. The integration of the abovementioned vocabularies in a knowledge base infrastructure will therefore improve the ability of end-users to explore and exploit EO data.