PNNL

Abstract

In the spring of 2013 the U.S. White House by executive order mandated: “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” Key for the reusability of any scientific data is hereby the availability of metadata describing the published data in a vocabulary that is familiar to its potential users. The objective of this paper is to help scientific application developers who want to adopt the continuous stream of new community vocabularies to help make their data sharable, self-describable, and easily understood. To achieve this we suggest semantic vocabulary and application integration best practices and discuss the tradeoffs of encoding vocabularies through code versus deriving code from vocabularies.