Harmonizing GCW Cryosphere Vocabularies with ENVO and SWEET. Towards a General Model for Semantic Harmonization

This paper presents the specific process used by members of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Semantic Harmonization Cluster, to harmonize cryospheric terms gathered by the Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) with two leading semantic resources used in the Earth and Environmental science communities-the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) and the Environment Ontology (ENVO). This process led to updates to both ENVO and SWEET as well as the development of an alignment file relating cryospheric terms in ENVO to those in SWEET. In addition, we summarize several leading practices which may be applied to other projects/realms within Earth and Environmental science and perhaps beyond, as well as suggest a generalized process for doing so. This paper describes the history of the effort, the technical and decision-making processes used to resolve differences between semantic resources, and describes several issues encountered, with a focus on those that were addressed during the effort. Lessons learned, examples of the problems encountered and a summary of resulting leading practices growing out of this work is provided. Keywords: semantic resource, semantic harmonization, cryosphere, lessons learned, FAIR data, leading practices