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Description: Semantic Technologies are becoming commonplace in the geoscience community. Within this collection of tools, techniques, and methodologies, the ontology is a basic building block. Yet, despite the interest and uptake in semantics, there still exist several challenges to consuming semantic data and reusing existing ontologies. One challenge is that ontologies can be created by varying means (manual vs auto- mated), varying methodologies (e.g. the Fox and McGuinness method [1]), and to varying levels of domain and logical expressiveness. Ultimately, the goal is for wide spread uptake and reuse of ontologies. Yet, attempts to describe an entire domain within an ontology have led to difficulties in reuse both within the geosciences and the broader Semantic Web community. It has become apparent over the past few years that common conceptual patterns are repeated in ontologies emerging from different communities and domains. Analogous to using design patterns to create software, the study of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) [2,3] advocates the reuse of small modular ontologies as opposed to large ontologies de- scribing full domain areas. This modularizing of ontologies into reusable patterns (ODPs) enhances reuse and simplifies interoperability issues [4]. Not surprisingly, Linked Data [5, 6], which is based on data published and consumed against ontology schema, have also not seen as much consumption as would be liked. Recent research [7] has shown that ODPs can also be beneficial in facilitating more, and easier, Linked Data consumption. The ODP research area is new and the basic benefits of ODPs are just now beginning to be validated in the broader Semantic Web community. At present, limited validation within the geosciences has occurred. Linked Data and ontologies are at the heart of the ESIP's Semantic Web Committee’s Strategic Vision and Road Map. This ESIP funded testbed project will provide crucial initial feedback regarding the benefits of ODPs in geoscience data publication and consumption. [1] http://tw.rpi.edu/web/doc/TWC SemanticWebMethodology [2] E. Blomqvist and K. Sandkuhl. Patterns in ontology engineering: Classification of ontology patterns. In ICEIS 2005, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Miami, USA, May 25-28, 2005, pages 413–416, 2005. [3] A. Gangemi. Ontology design patterns for semantic web content. In Y. Gil, E. Motta, V. R. Ben- jamins, and M. A. Musen, editors, The Semantic Web – ISWC 2005, 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November 6-10, 2005, Proceedings, volume 3729 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 262–276. Springer, 2005. doi:10.1007/11574620 21. [4] E. Blomqvist, P. Hitzler, K. Janowicz, A. Krisnadhi, T. Narock, and M. Solanki. Considerations regarding ontology design patterns. Semantic Web, 7(1), 2016. [5] T. Berners-Lee. Linked data: Design issues, 2006. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. [6] T. Heath and C. Bizer. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Morgan & Claypool, 2011. [7] V. Rodriguez-Doncel, A. A. Krisnadhi, P. Hitzler, M. Cheatham, N. Karima, and R. Amini. Pattern-based Linked Data publication: The Linked Chess Dataset case. In O. Hartig, J. Se- queda, and A. Hogan, editors, Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data co-located with 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2105), Beth- lehem, Pennsylvania, US, October 12th, 2015, volume 1426 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2015.