Geological Information Capture with Sketches and Ontologies

Abstract

Recent groundbreaking research [3] has shown the viability and usefulness of qualitative information processing in the digitisation of geosciences, as well as the possible role of semantic knowledge representation as an underlying framework. While there is significant work on e.g. geological ontologies and the integration of geological data, means of data entry that are suitable for geologists remain a bottleneck. Form and table data entry methods are good matches for an ontology-based data entry system; however, they cannot fulfill geologists’ needs: to use sketches to express their idea and knowledge. This PhD project will lead to a novel user interface that will allow geologists to use sketches as an information entry method to input and store qualitative geological information in RDF format, which will enable machine-readable qualitative geological data query and reasoning in the future, and bring geology digitization one step forward. In this research work, assuring that qualitative geological information is captured completely and correctly is one of the main challenges.