UC3/US1 Maintain and Share common soil thesauri

[pvgenuchten]

As a data holder, collecting soil profile data from agricultural land

I want Soilwise/EUSO to indicate common code lists and thesauri for soil properties and procedures to use

so I can describe my field observations and laboratory measurements using terms linked to common terms and compare the data with other datasets.

Extended user story description

ESDAC/EUSO is the relevant authority to adopt/define common code lists in the EU. The system should offer functionality to share these code lists, but also offer capabilities to request and discuss changes to these code lists.

Where available, the system links terms to existing definitions in the global or topic thesauri, such as agrovoc, glosis, gemet, dbpedia and the inspire registry.

In some cases I need to extend a thesaurus to match local use. Can EUSO provide good practices on how to extend a thesaurus? Are good practices available on how to link to these thesauri from iso19115 or Datacite (zenodo) metadata to improve discoverability?

Background

A number of code list repositories are generally used in soil science:

• Agrovoc is maintained by FAO since the 1980’s. It consists of >41000 concepts translated in up to 42 languages.
• Glosis codelists are based on codelists published as part of the guidelines for soil description (FAO, 2006) as well as publications of ISRIC related to soil sampling and analysis procedures. Glosis web ontology is maintained as a Github Repository including an change advisory board consisting of the developers.
• GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, has been developed as an indexing, retrieval and control tool for the European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copenhagen
• INSPIRE registry has been set up by JRC to facilitate adoption of thesauri in the INSPIRE community. It advertises a number of thesauri from the Data theme data models as well as duplicates a number of codelists from other sources (gemet). Member state contact points of INSPIRE can suggest changes to the thesauri, change requests are managed via the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Framework (MIF). INSPIRE registry aims to align with European (Environmental) laws.
• DBpedia is based on information captured in Wikipedia, contributed by the user community. A large part of the semantic web is clustered around topics in the dbpedia knowledge graph.

Special mention to the WRB working group of IUSS. WRB publishes every 4 years an updated version of the World Reference Base (as pdf). Recent editions of WRB include an updated subset of the code lists of guidelines for soil description (FAO, 2006). WRB does not publish these terms in an online service itself, aspects of these lists are maintained by Agrovoc and Glosis web ontology.

For Soil Biology use of the gbif repository is relevant. The repository links to a number of thesauri for different types of species, mostly originating from literature.

Acceptance Criteria

Must have

• [ ] Guidance on how to use/create code lists, including a list of relevant code list repositories

Nice to have:

• [ ] Code list imports from existing repositories, to facilitate term discovery
• [ ] If EUSO aims to maintain code lists for the European soil community, users can suggest/discuss request changes to those lists
• [ ] Multilingual terms
• [ ] Option to define/share code list mappings (see also term linkage, as an embedded mapping)

[pvgenuchten]

Discussion at 27-2-24 indicated there are a number of sub stories here:

• Can Soilwise have a role in locating relevant codelists (or terms?)
• The governance of a codelist, will EUSO maintain its own codelists (or reference external), then how can users contribute to the content of a codelist
• Linkage between codes, if a new code is minted, make sure it is linked to similar terms in existing code lists (agrovoc, gemet, dbpedia, inspire)
• Define/share code list mappings to harmonise data (using AI)

[pvgenuchten]

In the EJPSoil project, the topic of code list (extension) has been researched quite extensively. conclusion is that multiple communities adopted selected procedures for codelist governance, which are not always compatible and used to their potential.

• EEA and JRC are aiming at governmental usage. Procedures for codelist contributions are defined, an authority should be involved and a legal ground is required.
• Glosis is a community (GSP) effort with good coverage of soil terminology, adoption is (still) low and governance can be improved
• DBPedia is a community effort, very extensive, but with limited adoption in science/government
• FAO/IUSS has a high adoption, but its governance and online presence is not very obvious

EJPSoil to date has not endorsed a single approach, which results in the undesirable option to extend the INSPIRE codelists to local need. An optimal way to extend (or create) a code list locally will add links from terms to similar terms in remote code lists).

[pvgenuchten]

webinar 1-3-2024 Benchmarks; the issue came up that the isqaper project created a list of soil management practices, which will be extended in the scope of benchmarks. However these lists are not maintained in a referencable way (which is a challenge for the benchmarks data team). Also the relation to agrovoc is unclear. Agrovoc tillage practices may be too generic for the purpose of soil-amelioration