Common Thesaurus framework for Nature Conservation (IT)
Good practice “title”
Common Thesaurus framework for Nature
Conservation
Key-word(s)
Monitoring
Reporting
Organisational set-ups
Infrastructure creation
System integration
Dataset harmonisation
Metadata management
Education & Research
Public information
Environmental information (in general)
Other:
Theme(s) mainly addressed
Country(ies)
Air
Climate change
Land-use
Water
Soil
Forests
Agriculture
Biodiversity
Waste
Chemicals
Natural resources
Noise
Risk
Multi-purpose management of environmental data
Environmental indicators
Other (please specify below)
Habitat, biotopes, species
Local
National
Regional
European
International/global
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Outline/General description
Short description
The Common Thesaurus framework for Nature Conservation is a multithesauri solution to define/share standard technological and scientific
terms of geographic data understandable by different user communities
operating in the fields Nature Conservation, in particular on the
following data themes listed in INSPIRE annex are considered:
Protected Sited, Biogeographical Region, Habitat & Biotopes, and
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Common Thesaurus framework for Nature Conservation (IT)
Kind of practice
Drivers
Legal aspects
Geographical area covered
Actors
Users
Species Distribution. In the framework different well known knowledge
organization systems (classifications, taxonomies and thesauri) for the
four Nature Conservation themes are shared and assembled. For this
purpose the framework is characterized by the properties of modularity
and openness for further thesaurus extension and updating, and the
ability of interconnection between thesauri and exploitability from other
systems. The framework has been implemented considering the
semantic web\W3C recommendations. In particular thesauri have been
encoded in a machine understandable format SKOS (Simple Knowledge
Organization System) and published exploiting existing protocols in the
web according to the linked data best practices.
Repository
Catalogue
X
Portal
X
Information services
X
E-government
Targeted Project
Organisational practice
X
Training and capacity building
Communication
X
Other (please specify below)
W3C recommendations
INSPIRE directive
EUNIS http://eunis.eea.europa.eu
IUCN http://www.iucn.org/
Sub-national
One Country
More Countries
International/global
Actors’ role
Data producer(s)
Data analysis by …
Quality assurance by …
Others to be quoted
Primary users
Other users
Name
X
URL if available
EKOLab-IIA-CNR (IT)
ETC/BD - EEA
General public,
Local, regional and national administration,
Research institutions (national and
international), information technology
relevant institutions, schools and all other
institutions with focus on natural
conservation sciences
International Organization working on
Knowledge Organization Systems
Data aspects
Origins of data
Content of the Common thesaurus Framework is mainly produced from
harmonised the following sources:
- EARTh, the Environmental Applications reference thesaurus in English
and Italian language developed by EKOLab of National Research
Council of Italy.
- The EUNIS Database is the European Nature Information System,
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Common Thesaurus framework for Nature Conservation (IT)
developed and managed by the European Topic Centre on Biological
Diversity (ETC/BD in Paris) for the European Environment Agency
(EEA) and the European Environmental Information Observation
Network (Eionet).
- The Digital Map of European Ecological Regions DMEER
- The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Considered datasets
Metadata
Information flow
Yes
Some
No
If yes, which standard(s)
If yes, is there a metadata
catalogue within the system?
EARTH has been compiled and mainteined by CNR-IIA-ECOlab.
Ownership of such material always remains with the CNR-IIA-ECOlab,
not withstanding user’s right to use of this materials according to the
End-User License Agreement (EULA)
Thesauri on Species (<http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/species.jsp>) and
Habitat types (<http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/habitats.jsp>) are extracted by
EUNIS Database. EUNIS is the European Nature Information System
maintained by the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity
(ETC/BD, <http://biodiversity.eionet.europa.eu/>) for the European
Environment Agency (EEA, <http://www.eea.europa.eu/>) and the
European Environmental Information Observation Network (Eionet,
<http://eionet.europa.eu/>). The information is provided by countries
and from literature sources."
Technical implementation/Solutions (if any, please add graphics)
Infrastructure/System
architecture
Data logging and transmission
Technological description of
information services
Each thesaurus has been encoded in SKOS (Simple Knowledge
Organization System) developed within the W3C framework. Linked
Data best practices have been adopted to enable an easy exploitation of
the thesaurus framework on the web. D2R Server has been adopted also
to publish the sub-thesauri encoded in SKOS according to the linked
data best practices.
The following open source software components are utilized:
- D2R Server
- MYSQL
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
Web services (as defined by W3C)
 WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
 SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
 REST (Representational State Transfer)
 XML-RPC (remote procedure call)
Elements of Semantic Web
 RDF (Resource Description Framework)
 RDF Schema (a knowledge representation language)
X
X
OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards
 WMS (Web Map Service)
 WFS (Web Feature Service)
 WCS (Web Coverage Service)
 SWE (Sensor Web Enablement)
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Common Thesaurus framework for Nature Conservation (IT)
Other(s):
Others
Information on the implementation
Status of implementation
Funding
Communication policy
Year of start
Year of steady state
Future planned development(s)
Planned
In progress
Operational
National
EU
Other
X
X
X
X
2009
2010
Exploitation of the Common Thesaurus Framework within the
NatureSDIplus Geoportal for data searching and metadata compilation
(September 2010)
Improved content:
- Updating with new version of EARTH (when available)
- Multilingual extension of the thesauri (whenever available in other
languages)
Problems, lessons, comments and
recommendations
URL
Reference person
Organisation
Department
e-mail contact
The common thesaurus framework will be made available to semantic
web community and for all word wide users who are interested in
searching resources by Web of Data (beginning of 2010)
- Problem. Different knowledge organization systems are available
among different communities working on Nature Conservation.need to
use nature conservation data in a standardized way and with a common
nomenclature both in a multicultural and a multilingual context.
- Problem: Multilingual issue: lack of knowledge organization systems
in different languages.
- Lesson: Importance of a “open” framework to share knowledge.
Linked data best practices combined with thesaurus encoding in SKOS
allows to meet the requirements to properly share knowledge
organization systems: modularity, openness, exploitability and
interlinking.
http://linkeddata.ge.imati.cnr.it:2020, http://www.nature-sdi.eu/
Monica De Martino
National research Council (CNR)
Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies
(IMATI)
[email protected]
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