OntoPortal-Astro, a semantic artefact catalogue for astronomy

Abstract

The astronomy communities are widely recognised as mature communities for their open science practices. However, while their data ecosystems are rather advanced and permit efficient data interoperability, there are still gaps between these ecosystems. Semantic artefacts (SAs) – e.g., ontologies, thesauri, vocabularies or metadata schemas – are a means to bridge that gap as they allow to semantically described the data and map the underlying concepts. The increasing use of SAs in astronomy presents challenges in description, selection, evaluation, trust, and mappings. The landscape remains fragmented, with SAs scattered across various registries in diverse formats and structures – not yet fully developed or encoded with rich semantic web standards like OWL or SKOS – and often with overlapping scopes. Enhancing data semantic interoperability requires common platforms to catalogue, align, and facilitate the sharing of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) SAs. In the frame of the FAIR-IMPACT project, we prototyped a SA catalogue for astronomy, heliophysics and planetary sciences. This exercise resulted in improved vocabulary and ontology management in the communities, and is now paving the way for better interdisciplinary data discovery and reuse. This article presents current practices in our discipline, reviews candidate SAs for such a catalogue, presents driving use cases and the perspective of a real production service for the astronomy community based on the OntoPortal technology, that will be called OntoPortal-Astro.