Re: Schema.org extension for (geo)sciences

Hi Alasdair,
Thanks for connecting the dots. I’m glad we are coming together on this. From the ESIP Semantic Technologies side, this was our intention for this coming 6 months.
I want to state that Adam Shepherd and Doug Fils have spearheaded the science-on-schema.org work through their hard work. It is looking great but needs to be reviewed by a wide community.
Some more responses inline…

The science-on-schema.org<http://science-on-schema.org> documentation is really nice, and very easy to follow.
https://github.com/ESIPFed/science-on-schema.org


I take my hat off to Doug and Adam.

I see that your emphasis is on providing documentation on how to use schema.org to markup scientific datasets.

… and Data Repositories.

Are you aware of the RDA datadiscovery working group?

Yes, both bodies have been in touch. Mingfang is keen for us to align as well. This is all good.

Another similar initiative in which I am involved is Bioschemas (bioschemas.org<http://bioschemas.org/>). We are developing profiles over schema.org<http://schema.org/> types to capture expected usage within the life sciences. We have developed profiles over Dataset and DataCatalog but your documentation is far more detailed than ours.

That is a testament to the quality of detail Adam and Doug put into documentation. I agree with you.
With this in mind, we should quantify how useful the documentation is for the bioschemas.org effort. If it were to be extended, which areas would you extend, etc? Maybe however this conversation is best moved to a Github issue?

The other aspect of Bioschems is extending schema.org<http://schema.org> to include types and properties for describing life science concepts such as DNA, Gene, and Protein.

Excellent.

In doing this, we have also found the need for defining more cross-cutting types such as LabProtocol and Sample. For the latest state of play, you are best looking at our development drafts
http://bioschemas.org/specifications/drafts


This is brilliant.

Although we are currently discussing a further refinement of these types and properties which we hope to have on our website soon.

OK

There is a lot of crossover in what science-on-schema.org<http://science-on-schema.org>, Bioschemas, and the RDA datadiscovery group are trying to do. We should see how best to combine our efforts.

Yes absolutely. From the get go I am going to throw out some possible forums for us to formally come together

  *   13th RDA Plenary Meeting, Philidelphia, PA, USA 2nd-4th- April, 2019. Mingfang already invited representation from the ESIP Semantic Technologies Community so we will definitely be present and will be covering the science-on-schema.org work.
  *   The 2019 ESIP Summer meeting will be July 16 - 19th, 2019, in Tacoma, WA. We will have hosting a day long Geosemantics Symposium on the 15th July and then hosting a meeting long semantics theme… we would hope that this would be another excellent forum for us all to come together to keep the momentum going. Also, the semantic technologies committee does have a budget to extend to facilitate travel.

In your email you also mentioned geosci.schema.org. Is there a link to to this activity? I couldn’t find an

Adam and Doug were talking about possibly rebranding science-on-schem.org to simply geosci.schema.org. This was merely a thought ☺

You may also be interested in some of the software tooling that have been developing to support deployments of Bioschemas. We currently have a prototype generator and are working on a validation tool.

Can you provide links to them? We have been talking about tooling recently so this would be nice.


Thank you for taking the initiative to reach out and join us all. This is very exciting.

Lewis