The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC) is building a research database to index the full body of data from the $500M 10-year study on the effects of oil spills on the environment and human health. An online search and browse capability will support both human and machine queries of the database. The system will be based on Lucene software libraries for retrievals and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) approaches for binding concepts, vocabulary terms, definitions, and relationships between these into computable structures. This will enable retrieval of related items as well as exact matches. Data providers were required to submit standards-based metadata describing “who, what and where” to GRIIDC. The use of controlled-vocabularies for measured parameters, which is needed for interoperability, were recommended but not required. For some disciplines, controlled-vocabularies were readily available in the registry at the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) website. While extensive, the vocabularies contained therein do not span the terminology space needed for the all elements of the project (e.g., dispersants). The authors above comprise the working group tasked to complete the GRIIDC vocabulary. They will do this by assigning each term in the database to related terms in established controlled-vocabularies and constructing a supplemental vocabulary for orphan terms. The concatenated results will be registered with MMI.