A Chinese Geological Time Scale Ontology for geodata discovery

It is crucial in scientific research to discover and obtain specified and relevant data efficiently and accurately, while the ambiguity of keywords, imperfectness and inexactness of descriptions of datasets make it a hard task to improve the recall ratio and precision ratio in geodata retrieve. Aims at providing a possible solution to these problems, this paper studied the design and construction of the Chinese Geological Time Scale Ontology (CGTO) regarding the temporal features within datasets. CGTO, which is built on the basis of the Time Ontology constructed before, is divided into 4 subsystems and 2 supplementary systems, including the Chinese and international version of geochronologic and chronostratigraphic systems together with GSSP (Global Stratotype Section and Point). Classes and instances in CGTO are related to each other by using predicates defined in this study such as “geologicAge” and “hasGSSP”, or temporal topological relations derived from the basic Time Ontology, like “intAfter” and “intMeets” which represent the time order of interval time entities. At the end of this paper, some future works are discussed in order to make CGTO more applicable.