Research and data management communities in the earth and environmental sciences are increasingly recognizing the value of using formal, controlled vocabularies for annotating datasets, rather than relying on unconstrained keywords. However, data managers and users have many potential vocabularies to choose from, that are hosted in multiple ways (https://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/, http://www.ontobee.org/, http://esipfed.github.io/cor/), often with overlapping topical coverage and differences in how they are formally constructed and managed. The community currently needs guidelines for choosing among available vocabularies, to ensure data can be more readily found and interpreted by target stakeholders.
The goal of this working session is to outline a set of guidelines to assist repositories and data managers in choosing appropriate vocabularies. Concise guidelines will assist them in ascertaining the quality and utility of a controlled vocabulary, and must be balanced with vocabulary’s own concerns for broad interoperability, adaptability, reliability and governance. The guidelines should serve to clarify how vocabulary features can help meet the data discovery and re-use needs of researchers, as well as generally fulfilling the vision of making research data more FAIR.
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