The use of controlled, accepted, preferably multi-lingual, vocabularies can help achieve open-science outcomes

Environmental science teams are characteristically multi-disciplinary, multi-national, and multi-organisational. The environmental and ecological challenges that face us make these characteristics unavoidable if the best open science is to be achieved. The importance of ensuring the terms that describe shared data, and indeed information, are well-understood and properly defined cannot be under-estimated, not just within the teams, but also when sharing the results with the world. Fundamental to the achievement of open science is sharing the data on which you base your work for others to use. For this you need to have your data, at the very least, understandable by others. Three approaches are proposed to improve the use of controlled, accepted, preferably multi-lingual, vocabularies, and these are discussed in the presentation, to provide exemplars, to encourage early alignment with an intended repository (TRUSTed of course), and to provide educational packages. It is recommended that these are all valuable, while taking care of any confounding factors, such as multi-linguality and researcher's ability to efficiently discover suitable vocabularies for them to use or contribute to.
This presentation is a contribution from the PARSEC team. PARSEC is a project sponsored by the Belmont Forum as part of its Collaborative Research Action (CRA) on Science-Driven e-Infrastructures Innovation (SEI), with funding from FAPESP, the ANR, JST and the NSF, with collaborators from Australia, and support from the synthesis centre CESAB of the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity.