The TIB Terminology Service and Its Terminology Collection for the Earth System Sciences

Advancing Earth System Sciences (ESS) depends on our ability to integrate highly diverse data from a range of disciplines, including geographical information sciences, palaeontology, marine science, biodiversity research, atmospheric sciences and biology. A major scientific obstacle to this integration is semantic heterogeneity: different disciplines use different methods and terms to describe data, resulting in fragmented vocabularies. We address this challenge by providing the ESS terminology collection, which is a source of state-of-the-art terminologies for this scientific community. This collection already contains 50 curated terminologies. New terminologies can be suggested by scientists at any time. The ESS collection enables the consistent annotation and semantic alignment of heterogeneous ESS research data. It enhances the FAIR data principles—particularly findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability—thereby facilitating interdisciplinary research and data reuse. This collection enables the ESS community to assess the quality and completeness of ontology metadata and the extent to which their terms comprehensively represent the scientific content of a field.