Capturing and Sharing Our Collective Expertise on Climate Data: The CHARMe Project

AbstractFor users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one’s needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety, and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe (Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services) is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports, or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this “commentary” information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search, and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems ...