A comprehensive construction of the domain ontology for stratigraphy

Stratigraphic knowledge, the cornerstone of geoscience, needs to be represented by the Knowledge Graph based upon ontology, in order to apply the state-of-the-art big-data techniques. This study aims to comprehensively construct the ontologies for the stratigraphic domain. This has been achieved by a federated, crowd intelligence-based collaboration among domain experts of major stratigraphic subdisciplines. The initial step is to enumerate key terms from authoritative references and incorporate them into the Geoscience Professional Knowledge Graphs (GPKGs) of Deep-time Digital Earth Project. During this process, semantic heterogeneities were meticulously addressed by professional judgement aided by an automatic detection of Homonyms at the GPKGs platform. Afterwards, these terms were further differentiated as either classes or properties and arranged in a hierarchical framework in a top-down process. Consequently, seven ontologies are constructed for major stratigraphic branches, i.e., Lithostratigraphy, Biostratigraphy, Chronostratigraphy, Chemostratigraphy, Magnetostratigraphy, Cyclostratigraphy and Sequence Stratigraphy. The ontology of Biostratigraphy, among them, is elaborated here, as no biostratigraphic ontology has been attempted before to our knowledge. The constructed biostratigraphic ontology comprises following major root classes: Fossil, Biostratigraphic unit, Biostratigraphic horizon. Altogether, they contribute to the eventual dating and correlating of strata in another root class: Biostratigraphic correlation. In summary, the achievements of this study are probably heretofore the most comprehensive ontologies for the stratigraphic domain. Moreover, a proto model of semantic search engine was conceived to discuss potential application of our work for better querying stratigraphic references, utilizing the semantic liaison of the classes in the constructed ontologies.