The Ocean Best Practice community includes experts from many disciplines and levels of experience, including young professionals. Definitions collected below are aimed at facilitating cross-domain communications within the community,
Best Practice: A best practice is a methodology that has repeatedly produced superior results relative to other methodologies with the same objective.
Controlled vocabularies: A controlled vocabulary is an organized arrangement of words and phrases used to index content and/or to retrieve content of documents through browsing or searching. It typically includes preferred terms in professional or common usage. The purpose of controlled vocabularies is to organize information and to provide terminology to catalog and retrieve information (extracted from http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intro_controlled_vocab/what.pdf).
Faceted search: Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a navigation system, allowing users to narrow down the search results by applying multiple filters.
Linked data: is a method of publishing structured data to the web such that it
Metadata: Data that describes other data. Meta is a prefix that in most information technology usages means “an underlying definition or description.” Metadata summarizes basic information about data, which can make finding and working with particular instances of data easier; metadata may also be applied to descriptions of methodologies.
Natural language search: is a computerized search performed by parsing a query phrased in everyday language, where the user would phrase questions as though they were talking to another human.
Ontology: A formalized, machine-readable, and logically consistent representation of human knowledge, typically organizing phenomena into a hierarchy of categories and their instances. Categories and instances are connected through logical relationships which can be understood by machines.
Peer review: is a process by which a scholarly work (such as a paper or a research proposal) is checked by a group of experts in the same field to make sure it meets the necessary standards before it is published or accepted.
Semantics: means the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure; the branch of study within linguistics, philosophy, and computer science which investigates the nature of meaning and its role in practical applications.
Standards: Standards are part of a continuum of community agreements . In many cases, standards are best practices which have been formally encoded through panels in standards organizations.
Standard operating procedures (SOP): is a set of step-by-step instructions compiled by an organization to help workers carry out complex routine operations.
Tagging: in information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a datum or information content entity (such as a digital image, word or phrase in an electronic document or a computer file). This kind of metadata describes an item or subitem and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.
Value Chain: A value chain can be defined as the set of value-adding activities that one or more organizations perform in creating and distributing goods and services (Longhorn and Blakemore 2008). In terms of EO, the value chain approach can be applied to consider societal benefits of the data and assess the value of data and data features
Vocabulary: A list or collection of words or of words and phrases usually alphabetically arranged and explained or defined.