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
http://www.onegeology-europe.eu. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.usgin.org. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.auscope.org.au. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/XML. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/RDF. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/OWL. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://stratigraphy.org/column.php?id=Chart/Time%20Scale. Accessed 20 March 2012
http://www.geosciml.org. Accessed 22 March 2012
See: http://geosociety.org/TimeUnits. Accessed 03 January 2013
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/ntriples. Accessed 22 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax. Accessed 22 March 2012
http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle. Accessed 22 March 2012
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’.
http://dublincore.org. Accessed 22 March 2012
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
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec. Accessed 22 March 2012
http://ccgm.free.fr. Accessed 22 March 2012
http://stratigraphy.org/column.php?id=GSSPs. Accessed 22 March 2012
http://resource.geosciml.org/ontology/timescale. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://resource.geosciml.org/vocabulary/timescale. Accessed 14 January 2013
https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/wiki/Siss/VocabularyFormalizationInSKOS. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://tw.rpi.edu/web/project/SeSF/workinggroups/OntologyEvaluation. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. Accessed 14 January 2013
https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/wiki/CGIModel/GeologicTime. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://code.google.com/p/linked-data-api. Accessed 14 January 2013
http://www.cgi-iugs.org/tech_collaboration/geoscience_terminology_working_group.html. Accessed 15 January 2013
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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-013-0110-x