The last week of my DataONE summer internship has been filled with exciting advances. I worked on adding more permafrost classes to the Arctic ECSO and pruned the new ENVO import. Mark and Margaret presented on ECSO at the Earth Science Information Partners meeting in Bloomington Indiana.
The new ENVO import has 4645 entities created, 321 entities deleted, 0 renames and 1043 entities modified from the old ENVO import into ECSO. Some of these additions are not relevant to ECSOโs goals and could be deleted. The largest of these was anatomical entity with had 2859 new classes. With that super class gone the new ENVO import has 1786 new entities. The other classes that were deleted from the import were anthropogenic geographic feature, astronomical object, Eukaryota, and bodily fluid. This leaves the new import with 1555 new entities. The majority of the entities are related to chemical processes and are particularly useful for the Arctic Data Centerโs needs since the majority of the data hosted by them is chemical in nature. A great example of this is alkane, the new ENVO import contains the class alkane from this class I was able to make several subclasses for each of the n-alkane (straight chain alkanes) that are used as paleoclimate proxies for changes in salinity, temperature, etc.
Following the creation of the new alkane classes I then decided to merge the Arctic ECSO into the master ECSO with the new ENVO import. Now the master ECSO contains the new classes for the Arctic Data Center. These new classes were created based on queries of the ADC database and discussions with Mark on the pressing need for permafrost terminology within ECSO. You can see the final product here.
It has been a wonderful experience working with the ECSO team on further developing the ECSO ontology for the Arctic Data Center this summer. I want to thank Mark, Julien and Margaret for their help and encouragement on this project. I look forward to hearing more about ECSO as it develops in the future.