Designing a modular architecture for the structural geology ontology
Hassan A. Babaie, John S. Oldow, Abbed Babaei, Hans G. Avé Lallemant, Anne Watkinson · Geological Society of America eBooks · 2006
Ontologies constitute one of the most important and enabling components of the semantic Web, allowing geoscientists to explicitly and formally model their knowl-edge base for sharing and reuse over a global network. The geoscience community, realizing the need for such knowledge-enhancing technologies, has started develop-ing a series of geo-ontologies for specifi c fi elds. We analyze the problems of designing geo-ontologies, emphasizing issues related to conceptual modeling and system archi-tecture, and present the preliminary conceptual model of part of the structural geol-ogy ontology (StructuralGeoOntology). We discuss the ontology development process and identify a set of useful steps and activities that enhance and facilitate the develop-ment of any geo-ontology. Developing ontologies for any fi eld in the geosciences becomes complex if all the concepts and their relationships in the fi eld are included in a single, large ontology. To reduce complexity, we design the StructuralGeoOntology with a modular archi-tecture involving multiple ontologies. This component-based ontology merges sever-