2018 ESIP Winter Meeting

Since 2015, United Nations Environment has been working with experts in knowledge representation technologies to map the complex interlinkages between the key entities referred to by the Sustainable Development Goals, their targets, and indicators. This semantic map - the SDG Interface Ontology - will allow information products from a multitude of sources and stakeholders to be linked to a common semantic layer. Further, it facilitates the disambiguation of terms with multiple meanings across disciplines, regions, and cultural contexts. This is critical to coherently linking information, data, and knowledge about sustainable development, as it helps preserve consistent interpretation long after content providers are no longer able to guide further usage. The technologies used to create this map are native to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry and Library (obofoundry.org), and are currently being aligned to the ESIP-coordinated Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET; sweet.jpl.nasa.gov). This session will briefly introduce the importance and value of this alignment, with emphasis on its interface to the SDGs and UN information systems. Most importantly, we will show how experts in any field can ensure that their knowledge is represented in this endeavour, laying the foundation for cross-domain collaboration and informatics.