Using Interlinked Thesauri for INSPIRE-Compliant Metadata Management.

As part of the eENVplus project about infrastructures for the INSPIRE implementation, a Thesaurus Framework (LusTRE) is being developed which allows to interlink different environmental domain thesauri and offers access to them as one virtual integrated linked data source – which shall support better metadata compilation and metadata discovery for describing and finding INSPIRE data and services. Further, a Web Service infrastructure is being provided (the LusTRE Exploitation Services, LusTRE-ES) that allows to make optimum use of the knowledge contained in LusTRE for improving existing metadata tools. In this paper, we give an overview of LusTRE and present important aspects of the LusTRE-ES: its architecture and design principles, the REST interface, the list of services / service modules under development, and the way how these services shall improve existing metadata tools. 1. Overview The EU-FP7 CIP-PSP pilot project eENVplus (“eEnvironmental services for advanced applications within INSPIRE”) develops – within ten INSPIRE/SEIS pilot-implementation testbeds – an ecosystem of software services for comprehensively supporting all aspects of interoperable environmental information services. As part of eENVplus, a thesaurus framework (LusTRE) is being developed and exemplarily filled which allows interlinking of different domain thesauri. In this paper, we present the eENVplus thesaurus exploitation services: Web services exploiting the domain knowledge contained in the interlinked thesauri for the purposes of metadata creation and maintenance and for resource discovery. The services can be used by different tools such as metadata editors, metadata validators, CSWs, information portals or specific application solutions. Some exemplary use cases: - The eENVplus thesaurus exploitation services can deliver to a search engine synonymous, broader, narrower or related terms from several interlinked thesauri or controlled vocabularies which facilitates cross-domain, cross-corpus, cross-boundary and multilingual search. - For a user who is less experienced in some domain and who has to create or maintain metadata, the visualization service as well as visual browsing through conceptual spaces of several interlinked thesauri together with term explanations and term translations can help to better understand and use the provided thesauri, controlled vocabularies and code lists.