Enhancing the Discoverability and Interoperability of Multi-Disciplinary Semantic Repositories

The aggregation of multi-disciplinary information is a challenge faced by large-scale data infrastructures serving scientific domains such as biodiversity, agronomy or ecology. This requires the integration of ontologies or thesauri from different domains. These semantic resources are often hosted within domain specific repositories which can be harvested for that purpose. The lack of discoverability, the technical and metadata heterogeneity of the semantic repositories pose a challenge for their effective integration. In this context, we argue that there is a need for a semantic lookup-service to access and use this heterogeneous landscape. We then present a proof-of-concept design and implementation for harvesting different ontology repositories (BioPortal, AgroPortal and EBI-OLS). We show some preliminary analytics and discuss technical issues regarding aggregation. Finally, we conclude with an open call for collaboration to address the issues hampering such initiatives.

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