Wikidata has become a central hub for life science related knowledge and data that conforms to the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability as outlined in the influential “Science Forum: Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences(https://elifesciences.org/articles/52614).” Using this work on the life sciences topic as a model, how can the earth sciences leverage this large, multinational, accessible, sustainable community resource to improve science and applications related to earth science data? One example comes from Environment Canada which has imported metadata from 8,754 Meteorological Service of Canada stations into wikidata which is now queryable from the wikidata query service SPARQL endpoint (https://w.wiki/4LTi). Given that Wikidata represents a diverse, international data community whose work is built on semantic principles, it has the potential to enhance earth science data access for all people and provides inherent formal semantics, provenance and quality refinement mechanisms that enhance data usability, reliability and understanding.
Funding
CI CoE: CI Compass: An NSF Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Center of Excellence for Navigating the Major Facilities Data Lifecycle
Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering