From Data Portal to Knowledge Portal: Leveraging Semantic Technologies to Support Interdisciplinary Studies

Scientific research practices regularly adopt new technologies and platforms in an effort to increase information timeliness, sharing and discoverability. There are many initiatives related to open data, open code, open access, open collections, composing the topic of Open Science in academia. Being open has two levels of meanings. The first is to make the data, code, sample collections and publications, etc. freely accessible online. The other is the annotation and connection between those resources to establish the provenance information for reproducible scientific research. In this paper we present our work on a web portal for the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) community [1]. The DCO is a 10-year (2009-2019) initiative to intensify global attention and scientific effort in the burgeoning field of deep carbon science. Inspired by guiding questions such as “how much carbon does Earth contain?”, “where is it?” and “what can deep carbon tell us about origins?” more than 1000 scientists across the world are actively participating in the DCO community. The DCO web portal is a research collaboration website developed to keep track of all researchers, organizations, instruments, field sites, and research outputs related to the DCO community. We intend for the DCO web portal to be a knowledge portal adopting state-of-the-art semantic technologies to support various stages of the scientific process within and beyond the DCO community.