[Esip-soil-informatics] Recap Aug 11

Todd-Brown, Kathe kathe.toddbrown at essie.ufl.edu
Wed Aug 11 20:38:18 EDT 2021


Greetings wordy soils folks!

We revisited some of the metrics for the cluster proposal (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyplA7K7IHIY_yPXTydfFYNTwiXyrZY2R_9lu3LjRhk/edit?usp=sharing ) and in general it was a very successful first year! We hosted 22 cluster meetings over the past year and had an average of 10.5 folks per meeting, which makes us one of the more active clusters from what I’ve heard. We have a new YouTube channel with 6 presentations on it and between 15-50 views each, not going to break any records here but I’m quite comfortable with this presence (also points for amusing faces on opening shots). We completely flubbed our harmonization goal this year, which in retrospect was extremely ambitious. But we will fix this!

There was a lot of interest in this call in taking some data (soil pH in particular) and annotating it with several existing ontologies in an effort to 1) teach us poor domain researchers how to do such a thing, and 2) identify the gaps and possible opportunities across these ontologies. Some ontologies that were listed were GLOSIS, ODM, SOSA + SSN, ENVO, and AGRO. I will work up a draft of an announcement and design for a series of working meetings in October with a goal of having this live in September.

I gave a short report-out from the first ‘hackathon’ that I held this summer to kick around a community-produced soil ontology seed. We came up with https://github.com/ktoddbrown/CoSoDat  which focuses on a hieratical method descriptions within some value-unit-method and input-parameter-function tuples. Bulk density is fairly complete according to the group and dozen or so datasets we tested it against.

Both the ontology mapping and CoSoDat are seed work for a possible ENVO soil slice at some point in the future. Both activities are geared towards developing a core group of collaborative researchers in both soils and informatics who could provide substantive contributions to these semantic resources.

Next steps: Expect a draft in the next week on the soil pH hackathon that will be open for comments. If you have someone you think would be interesting to hear an update on their soil data project, feel free to snag one of the open spots this fall on the meetings document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_SIm_3e9xpni_64zdAU1DZrFEd8YcIerbsihDJq4qwY/edit?usp=sharing

Best,
-Kathe

---------
Katherine Todd-Brown, PhD
she/they

Assistant Professor
Environmental Engineering Sciences
Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
University of Florida

Office: Rm B006, Phelps Lab, UF main campus
Twitter: @KatheMathBio

Mail: Dr Kathe Todd-Brown
Center for Wetlands
PO Box 116350
Gainesville, FL 32611


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