Affiliations: Ontology Engineering Group. Dpto. de Inteligencia Artificial Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 28660, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain. E-mail: ralbertoni@fi.upm.es | CNR-IMATI, Via De Marini, 6, 16149 Genova, Italy. E-mail: {albertoni,demartino}@ge.imati.cnr.it | CNR-IIA-EKOLab – Environmental Knowledge Organization Laboratory, Area della Ricerca di Roma 1, Via Salaria Km 29,300 C.P. 10, I-00016 Monterotondo stazione RM, Italy. E-mail: {difranco,vds,plini}@iia.cnr.it
Abstract: The paper aims at providing a description of EARTh, the Environmental Application Reference Thesaurus. It represents a general-purpose thesaurus for the environment, which has been published as a SKOS dataset in the Linked Open Data cloud. It promises to become a core tool for indexing and discovery environmental resources by refining and extending GEMET, which is considered the de facto standard when speaking of general-purpose thesaurus for the environment in Europe, besides it has been interlinked to popular LOD datasets as AGROVOC, EUROVOC, DBPEDIA and UMTHES. The paper illustrates the main characteristics of EARTh as a guide to its usage. It clarifies (i) the methodology adopted to define the EARTh content; (ii) the design and technological choices made when publishing EARTh as Linked Data; (iii) the information pertaining to its access and maintenance. Descriptions of EARTh applications and future relevance are highlighted.
