There are many resources being gathered for use as part of the project including: (2RJO)
- Ontologies both general and Geo-specific which which are also discussed in educational components. (2RJP)
- Vocabularies (2RJQ)
- Data (2RJR)
- Tools such as an Open Ontology Repository for Geo-Ontologies, collaborative ontology editors and tools to support alignment (2RJS)
- Use Cases and requirements (2RJT)
- Briefing and Educational materials (2RJU)
These will be increasingly made available based on input and collaboration. (2RJV)
A start has been made on gathering ontologies and their storage as part of an open repository which was tested in late 2010. Relevant ontologies were selected as part of their domain relevance and potential for demonstrating added value to the scientific community (and society) by making existing geographic systems and applications interoperable and used within a semantic framework. (2RJW)
Examples of ontologies in this base include the geonames ontology at http://www.geonames.org/ontology, ontologies published by the Ordnance Survey and Geo-Concepts http://www.geospatialmeaning.eu/geo-ontologies-survey/W3C-Geo2007/. (2RKB)
As noted by the GEOSS (Global Earth System of Systems) effort several institutions have initiated efforts to propose a standard ontology and/or terminology/taxonomy related with Earth Observation. Besides GEOSS itself these include: (2RJX)
- The SWEET (Semantic Web for Environment and Technology) ontologies developed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and available at http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/2.1/sweetAll.owl. SWEET includes many useful environmental, ocean, geological and transportation sub-parts of interest. (2RJY)
- FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) has been making a similar attempt by creating AGROVOC [see "http://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/sub" and http://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/sub for a multilingual, structured, and controlled vocabulary that covers subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food, and related domains. (2RJZ)
- The European GEMET GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, EEA, see "http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet" http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet which has terminology for environmental topic of: (2RK0)
- "http://acm.eionet.europa.eu/" Air pollution and Climate Change mitigation (2RK1)
- "http://bd.eionet.europa.eu/" Biological Diversity (2RK2)
- "http://cca.eionet.europa.eu/" climate Change impacts, vulnerability and Adaptation (2RK3)
- "http://icm.eionet.europa.eu/" Inland, Coastal and Marine waters (2RK4)
- "http://sia.eionet.europa.eu/" Spatial Information and Analysis (includes in monitoring the land use/land cover change in Europe and analyzing the environmental consequences.) (2RK5)
- EAGLE (Eionet Action Group on Land monitoring in Europe)project supports the Inspire Thematic Working Group (TWG) on land cover and land use (2RK6)
- "http://scp.eionet.europa.eu/" Sustainable Consumption and Production (2RK7)
The INSPIRE Registry "http://inspire-registry.jrc.ec.europa.eu/" http://inspire-registry.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) also constitute examples of structured vocabularies in the SDI domain. (2RK8)
These are diverse approaches and question the community needs to address is how such multiple vocabularies be shared across communities. One idea is to map them to specific domain ontologies which have suitable semantics for his and also an ontology that allows vocabularies to be objects that are maintained. This idea will be explored in early workshops such as the Geo-Vo-Camp-DC-2011 planned for June 3-4 (see http://vocamp.org/wiki/GeoVoCampDC2011#What). (2RK9)