Use Case: Ontology development - Are semantic resources software that need citation?

[rduerr]

A variety of semantic resources have been or are being developed in the Earth sciences. In many cases, these are compiled by hand from other usually textual resources. For example, the ESIP community maintained SWEET ontology is partly based off the science keyword lists maintained by the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD). In other cases, these resources are generated using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques tailored to the Earth Sciences.

This leads to a few questions:

1. Are vocabularies, keyword lists, etc. considered software to be cited in the context of this group? If not, where should these sorts of entities be considered?
2. What about actual formal ontologies? This is probably a connection point to the ESIP Semantic cluster
3. What about the software used to semi-automatically generate any of the whole range of semantic resources in the Earth sciences?