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Recent progress on geologic time ontologies and considerations for future works

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Abstract

Semantic Web technologies bring innovative ideas to computer applications in geoscience. As an essential part of the Semantic Web, ontologies are increasingly discussed in the geoscience community, in which geologic time scale is one of the topics that have received the most discussion and practices. This paper aims to carry out a review of the recent progress on geologic time ontologies, discuss further improvements, and make recommendations for other geoscience ontology works. Several models and ontologies of geologic time scale are collected and analyzed. Items such as ontology evaluation, ontology mapping, ontology governance, ontology delivery and multilingual labels are discussed for advancing the geologic time ontologies. We hope the discussion can be useful for other geoscience ontology works, and we also make a few further recommendations, such as referring to an ontology spectrum in ontology creation, collaborative working to improve interoperability, and balancing expressivity, implementability and maintainability to achieve better applications of ontologies.

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Notes

  1. http://www.onegeology-europe.eu. Accessed 20 March 2012

  2. http://www.usgin.org. Accessed 20 March 2012

  3. http://www.auscope.org.au. Accessed 20 March 2012

  4. http://www.w3.org/XML. Accessed 20 March 2012

  5. http://www.w3.org/RDF. Accessed 20 March 2012

  6. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema. Accessed 20 March 2012

  7. http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos. Accessed 20 March 2012

  8. http://www.w3.org/OWL. Accessed 20 March 2012

  9. http://stratigraphy.org/column.php?id=Chart/Time%20Scale. Accessed 20 March 2012

  10. http://www.geosciml.org. Accessed 22 March 2012

  11. See: http://geosociety.org/TimeUnits. Accessed 03 January 2013

  12. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/ntriples. Accessed 22 March 2012

  13. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax. Accessed 22 March 2012

  14. http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle. Accessed 22 March 2012

  15. To distinguish chronostratigraphic (i.e., Eonothem, Erathem, System, Series and Stage) and geochronologic (i.e., Eon, Era, Period, Epoch and Age) units, here it is better to use ‘Series’ as the class of ‘LowerTriassic’.

  16. http://dublincore.org. Accessed 22 March 2012

  17. Due to the change of editorial office of the journal Episodes, the new web address for the paper shown here is: http://www.episodes.co.in/www/backissues/242/102-114%20Yin.pdf. Accessed 22 March 2012

  18. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec. Accessed 22 March 2012

  19. http://ccgm.free.fr. Accessed 22 March 2012

  20. http://stratigraphy.org/column.php?id=GSSPs. Accessed 22 March 2012

  21. http://resource.geosciml.org/ontology/timescale. Accessed 14 January 2013

  22. http://resource.geosciml.org/vocabulary/timescale. Accessed 14 January 2013

  23. https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/wiki/Siss/VocabularyFormalizationInSKOS. Accessed 14 January 2013

  24. http://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification. Accessed 14 January 2013

  25. http://tw.rpi.edu/web/project/SeSF/workinggroups/OntologyEvaluation. Accessed 14 January 2013

  26. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. Accessed 14 January 2013

  27. https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/wiki/CGIModel/GeologicTime. Accessed 14 January 2013

  28. http://code.google.com/p/linked-data-api. Accessed 14 January 2013

  29. https://wiki.csiro.au/display/ARRCSeminars/Delivering+controlled+vocabularies+on+the+web+−+persistent+identifiers+and+the+web+of+things. Accessed 14 January 2013

  30. http://www.cgi-iugs.org/tech_collaboration/geoscience_terminology_working_group.html. Accessed 15 January 2013

  31. GeoData2011 Workshop Report. http://tw.rpi.edu/media/latest/WorkshopReport_GeoData2011.pdf. Accessed 25 March 2012

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the two reviewers for their constructive comments which lead to the improvement of the manuscript. We also thank Mr. Jan Jellema, Dr. Kristine Asch, Dr. Simon Cox and Dr. Steve Richard for discussing recent works of geologic time ontologies.

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  1. Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Xiaogang Ma & Peter Fox

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  1. Xiaogang Ma
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Correspondence to Xiaogang Ma.

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Communicated by: Hassan Babaie

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Ma, X., Fox, P. Recent progress on geologic time ontologies and considerations for future works. Earth Sci Inform 6, 31–46 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-013-0110-x

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