The I-ADOPT Interoperability Framework for FAIRer data descriptions of
  biodiversity
  Biodiversity, the variation within and between species and ecosystems, is
essential for human well-being and the equilibrium of the planet. It is
critical for the sustainable development of human society and is an important
global challenge. Biodiversity research has become increasingly data-intensive
and it deals with heterogeneous and distributed data made available by global
and regional initiatives, such as GBIF, ILTER, LifeWatch, BODC, PANGAEA, and
TERN, that apply different data management practices. In particular, a variety
of metadata and semantic resources have been produced by these initiatives to
describe biodiversity observations, introducing interoperability issues across
data management systems. To address these challenges, the InteroperAble
Descriptions of Observable Property Terminology WG (I-ADOPT WG) was formed by a
group of international terminology providers and data center managers in 2019
with the aim to build a common approach to describe what is observed, measured,
calculated, or derived. Based on an extensive analysis of existing semantic
representations of variables, the WG has recently published the I-ADOPT
framework ontology to facilitate interoperability between existing semantic
resources and support the provision of machine-readable variable descriptions
whose components are mapped to FAIR vocabulary terms. The I-ADOPT framework
ontology defines a set of high level semantic components that can be used to
describe a variety of patterns commonly found in scientific observations. This
contribution will focus on how the I-ADOPT framework can be applied to
represent variables commonly used in the biodiversity domain.
