HR: 0800h
AN: SF41A-0758    [Abstracts]
TI: Representation of Structural Geology Knowledge with Ontology: Design and Implementation Issues
AU: * Babaie, H A
EM: mylonite_7@yahoo.com
AF: Department of Geology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 United States
AB: Ontology of a specific geological discipline is a domain model providing a vocabulary about key geological concepts and their relationships, and processes, theories, and principles in that field. Geologists apply existing domain knowledge when they study a geologic object such as the San Andreas Fault. The knowledge is based, explicitly and/or implicitly, on geologists' conceptualization or view of the world of geological objects, concepts, and their meaning and relationships. Ontology represents the domain knowledge by explicitly and formally specifying such conceptualizations shared by a community of geoscientists in a specific domain (e.g., stratigraphy). Ontology is used to more efficiently and formally share, reuse, and analyze domain knowledge (not just data), and to identify its implicit assumptions. Building an ontology begins by defining the purpose and scope of the ontology, and involves capturing the domain knowledge by identifying, evaluating, and documenting the concepts and their relations. These activities lead to the definition of classes representing the key domain concepts, in a taxonomic hierarchy, and their properties and values. This paper discusses the design principles, development process, life cycle, and methods required to build domain ontologies in geosciences. The Prot‚g‚ 2000 ontology-building tool and OWL markup language are applied to build an ontology for a part of the structural geology domain.
UR: http://www.gsu.edu/~geohab
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
DE: 8005 Folds and folding
DE: 8010 Fractures and faults
DE: 8099 General or miscellaneous
DE: 0910 Data processing
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting