Digital Objects Ontology: Capturing Connections in Environmental Research

Abstract

A complex web of people, places, tools and funding underpins environmental science research, and this landscape is welcoming an ever-broader range of research output types that goes far beyond written publications and datasets. Community engagement events, software, scientific models and laboratory protocols, to name but a few, can now be recorded in online catalogues and along with metadata. Describing and connecting research outputs robustly is key to making them discoverable and reusable by humans and machines, which benefits researchers and the scientific community by increasing the impact and reach of research outputs, showcasing existing infrastructure and encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration. At the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) we are working to improve how environmental research outputs are described and connected in online catalogues by creating a metadata schema grounded in linked data principles in the form of an ontology. The Digital Objects Ontology (DOO, https://nerc-ceh.github.io/digital-objects-ontology) allows describing environmental research outputs with structured metadata that goes beyond the standard metadata fields with which we have all become familiar (authors, description, spatial/temporal coverage, licence, keywords, associated publications, etc.). For any type of environmental research output, the DOO makes it possible to describe and link elements including: environmental monitoring facilities/networks that generated data, projects that enabled the research, funders/grants that funded it, people/organisations responsible for delivering the outputs and their roles, other research outputs that informed or contributed to the creation of the output. In practice this means that a metadata record for a dataset could link to the workflow and the environmental monitoring facility used to produce it, and link to a scientific model that used the dataset as input. It also allows crediting all those involved, such as the field technician, data curator and project manager who played vital roles in producing and publishing the dataset, and the organisations and grants that funded the research. This enhanced metadata offering comes with a multitude of benefits for environmental researchers, stakeholders, UKCEH and the environmental science community more broadly: it increases the FAIRness of research outputs thanks to better traceability and transparency around their provenance, it improves the visibility of research outputs by making them discoverable via new avenues and enhances the profile of the researcher, it raises awareness of our facilities and how they are being used, it encourages collaboration and multi-disciplinarity by showcasing the people and projects who are using facilities and re-using outputs, it allows researchers to tell a story about their outputs by linking them to tangible elements such as infrastructure, thereby allowing stakeholders to explore the bigger picture behind a research output.