International Geologiical Congress - Oslo 2008


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IEI-06 Data models and architectures


Ontological geosciences: An experiment to represent geodynamics using modeling languages


Xiaoliang Cai, China University of Geosciences (CUG) (China)
Kangping Sun, China University of Geosciences (China)


By ontological geosciences we mean geosciences that are recognizable by computers and expressed in hierarchical concrete concepts and geoscientific concept models.

One of the most important studies in ontological geosciences is how to represent geosciences or geodynamics by concepts or modeling languages. There are many modeling languages that can be used to express geosciences, e.g. OWL, UML, ORM, etc. We have selected Cmaptools and Visio-ORM to represent geodynamic knowledge. The former is based on a kind of object relation modeling language, and the later is based on object role modeling language.

The experiment is carried out as follows: geodynamic knowledge is first captured directly as short phrases including key words from the literature. Then related and implied knowledge is supplemented in order to make the captured knowledge independent of the background of the readers and finally the captured and supplemented knowledge is formalized as far as possible. More than 50 articles that focus on several themes have been planned as targets for testing.

This paper discusses geodynamic knowledge patterns discovered in the experimental literature. The two modeling languages used to express the geodynamic knowledge patterns are also compared. We believe that the main force in constructing ontological geosciences will be university students. Therefore, we describe our experience learned from the experimental process.

(Song Zhao, Qiaoming Zhang, Wenjing Xu, Zhen Dai, Lianglun He, Feng Wang, Xinyue Di, Xiaofang Hu, Liangliang Wang participated in the experiment)


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