2025/10/07 by Baptiste Cecconi, Jonquet, Clement, Fretel, Liza +7
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Data Quality and Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.05744
openalex publication_date 2025/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The OPAL (Ontology Portal for Astronomy Linked-data) project aims at forstering semantic interoperability in all fields of astronomy (including heliophysics, planetary sciences, astrophysics, astro-particles, numerical modeling, etc.). The astronomy communities are widely recognised as mature communities for their open science practices. However, while their data ecosystems are rather advanced and permit efficient data interoperability, there are still gaps between these ecosystems. Semantic artefacts (SAs) — e.g., ontologies, thesauri, vocabularies or metadata schemas — are a means to bridge that gap as they allow to semantically described the data and map the underlying concepts. The increasing use of SAs in astronomy presents challenges in description, selection, evaluation, trust, and mappings. The landscape remains fragmented, with SAs scattered across various registries in diverse formats and often with overlapping scopes. Enhancing data semantic interoperability requires common platforms to catalog, align, and facilitate the sharing of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) SAs. We show that the OntoPortal-Astro catalogue already resulted in improved vocabulary and ontology management in the communities, and is now paving the way for better interdisciplinary data sharing, discovery and reuse.