Release Ex altiora et profundis, Ex elementis, vita, siderum, et hominibus · EnvironmentOntology/envo

⚠️ As always, the new terms will be available after a few days as they percolate through the ether ⚠️

New editors!

We're happy to welcome Steven Chong and Mark Schildhauer as co-editors. Using our contribution guidelines, they'll be adding valuable cryosphere and carbon cycling terms to support their work with DataONE and related projects.

Remember, ENVO is a community resource - so please consider joining our editorial team or sending us a pull request from time to time!

Eponyms for this release

Ex Altiora (from the heights)

xref to The Magnus Archives

water-based cloud
high-elevation mountain

Description

In this long overdue release, a wide range of classes have been added in aid of ENVO's mission to support community requests and to provide a semantic brokering layer between classification standards in the Earth and environmental sciences. Highlights include:

Aligning with SWEET over the cryosphere: Monthly Cryohackathons based around Ruth Duerr's extensive work on the Global Cryosphere Watch's vocabularies (and many related vocabularies) have pushed forward ENVO's alignment with ESIP's SWEET resource, using expert input on the cryosphere to do so. We'll soon complete this as a model for future thematic and expert-led semantic alignment.
WMO cloud classification: Cloud genera have been added to bolster ENVO's atmospheric content. A range of qualities are now needed to fully axiomatise their morphologies and other characteristics.
CMECS: Ongoing work to express the very detailed and comprehensive Coastal and Marine Classification Standard has yielded some interesting examples, merging organismal taxonomy with geoforms and tightening up semantics around stratified water masses
Global Ocean Observing System's (GOOS) Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs): Working with UNESCO/IOC, we'll be creating classes for the EOVs, such as sea state, for semantic qualification of GOOS EOV specification sheets and data resources. This work also supports our integration with the UNESCO/IOC-IODE www.OceanBestPractices.org system.
Land use processes: An important request from our friends over at Nature Scientific Data led to the initialisation of a land use hierarchy. This is highly extensible and we'll be coordinating this with UN Environment's Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO) in the near future.
UNEP WCMC's mountain classification: Another valuable user request and follow-up with UNEP-WCMC resulted in a semantic expression of their new standard for mountain classification. We'll continue to weave this in to ENVO's elevation semantics in each release.

Known issues

Semantic handling of zones: The need for and usage of BFO:site in representing environmental zones is an ongoing discussion which may take some time to stabilise. Classes are unlikely to be removed en mass, but they may jump between material and immaterial hierarchies until a policy is formed.
Orphan classes: At the top level of the onotology, a few orphan classes from FOODON and PO may appear in the release and editors' version. This is likely an import artifact and has no known effects on reasoning. We'll try to root these out in the next release.

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Ex altiora et profundis, Ex elementis, vita, siderum, et hominibus

New editors!

Eponyms for this release

Ex Altiora (from the heights)

Ex Profundis (from the depths)

Ex Elementis (from the elements)

Ex vita (from life)

Ex Siderum (from the stars)

Ex Hominibus (from humankind)

Description

Known issues

New Terms