Environmental Information Data Centre:
enabling the discovery of CEH-held data
John Watkins
Deputy 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
EIDC Data Hub
Users
Web Access
UK Gov Catalogue
NERC Catalogue
CEH Information Gateway
View & download
(data access)
Metadata
catalogue
(data discovery)
Network
Linked data and
integration
Long-term
Storage and
Curation
EIDC Data Hub
National River
Flow Archive
Environmental
Change
Query &
visualisation tools
Data Transfer Process
NERC
Environmental
Bioinformatics
Centre
Biological
Records Centre
Other
Data
CEH
data
CEH
data
NERC
Designated
Data Centre
Data
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 data
have 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!