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Environmental Information Data Centre: enabling the discovery of CEH-held data

John WatkinsDeputy Director EIDC

CEH & NERC in a UK Government setting

CEH monitoring and data collection

• As diverse as our science

• Micro- to macro-scale

• Many sources:• Monitoring campaigns• 180+ field sites• State-of-the-art facilities• Regulator networks• Volunteers• Model outputs

• Long-term and unique

10µm

River Lambourn, Boxford

CEH data coordination – in partnership

Land Cover Map

NRFA

National River Flow Archive

Environmental Change

NetworkNERC

Environmental

Bioinformatics Centre

Biological Records Centre

Other Data

NERC Designated

Data Centre Data

CEH data

CEH data

Web Access

Users

CEH Information Gateway

Metadata catalogue

(data discovery)

Linked data and integration

Long-termStorage and

Curation

View & download(data access)

Query & visualisation tools

NERC CatalogueUK Gov Catalogue

Data Transfer Process

EIDC Data Hub

EIDC Data Hub

gateway.ceh.ac.uk

Links to NERC Data Catalogue Service

Links to UK Government Portal

Links to European INSPIRE Portal

Data citation via the Data Hub

“.....the datahave been allocated a digital object identifier (http://dx.doi.org/10.5285/1a91c7d1-ec44-4858-9af2-98d80f169bbd).”

Harmonising data definitions

CEH Analytical Services Thesaurus (CAST)

No specified vocabulary!

Making definitions open access

CEH Analytical Services Thesaurus (CAST)• Created to Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) W3C standard• Designed to describe whole process• Top concepts:

• determinands• machine descriptions• measurement units• methods• filtration• preservation

Importing definitions through Web links

Importing information through Web links

Resource oriented discovery

CEH Analytical Services Thesaurus (CAST)• SKOS allows links to externally hosted vocabularies e.g. ChEBI

• adds further value to datasets tagged using CAST, as they can be integrated with datasets tagged using concepts from linked vocabularies

Linking ecological concepts

Linking ecological concepts

Linking to multilingual definitions

Linking to multilingual definitions

Enabling complex environmental queries

Web as a research data resource

Issues & challenges

• Researchers can ask complex questions across diverse data sources using LOD

• How to incentivise data providers to document & tag data => buy-in (e.g. DOIs)!

• Tools to automate the process, tagging at source/time of creation (e.g. LIMS)

• Automating the creation of semantic information for legacy data using diverse information sources (e.g. text mining of past reports and science papers)

Thank you!