The NVS
The NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS) provides access to lists of standardised terms that cover a broad spectrum of the environmental science community. The NVS is technically-managed and hosted by the British Oceanographic Data Centre, part of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre (BODC, NOC), on behalf of the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). NVS is published as Linked Data described using SKOS, Dublin Core and other RDF vocabularies accessible via 3 different web services:
- RESTFul interface
- SOAP web service
- SPARQL endpoint
Argo vocabularies
Argo vocabularies, also known as reference tables, are used extensively to constrain the contents of the file in the Argo data system, and to enhance its interoperability.
VocPrez
All NVS vocabularies and services, including those used by or specific to Argo, can be accessed via the BODC installation of VocPrez, a new user interface to the original URL which provides an updated look and feel with additional functionality both for humans and machines. This development makes accessing the NVS easier, faster and more scalable. It also adds a user-friendly interface to the NVS to facilitate the adoption of the technology by a broader community of users, adding a more integrated user experience to the range of existing services. VocPrez enhances the machine to machine delivery of NVS by providing Linked Data in different serializations like json-LD, turtle, Ntriples, etc. aligning the NVS with the FAIR semantics. Finally, it enables content negotiation by profile which is a cutting-edge development.
Argo Vocabulary Editors
The content of the Argo vocabularies in managed by a team of editors through the NVS Vocab Editor.
Submitting new terms
If you wish to submit a new entry to the Argo vocabularies for review, you can submit these via the publicly accessible and visible NVS GitHub repo for Argo Vocabs, or members of the Argo Data Management Team can submit them via the Argo data management mailing list.