Agenames a stratigraphic information harvester and text parser

Abstract

A common task for earth scientists is the search for stratigraphic background information on a certain rock unit, e.g. its age and properties and its position within the hierarchy of stratigraphic units. Analogously, when geoscientists search for information in databases or within the internet the stratigraphic and geospatial constraints serve as a first orientation within a huge amount of data. However, spatio-temporal information is mostly only implicitly encoded e.g. in the title and abstract given in bibliographic databases and library catalogues. Means to decode spatial information from such texts has become commonly available through gazetteers and geocoding services, but the paleotemporal information remains elusive. Agenames is a stratigraphic information harvester and text parser which offers a web-service to parse geological texts and identify stratigraphic terms. The service has both a web-based GUI and a REST interface. The Agenames ontology records the stratigraphic rank of e.g. a chronostratigraphic or lithostratigraphic unit and the hierarchical relations between terms. Any geologic body has an associated age of origin, assigned by relation to a geochronologic unit from the geologic time scale. In a given text Agenames will identify potential stratigraphic keywords and use these terms to assign a geological age estimate. The web-service can also be used to augment web portals or library catalogues. Agenames can be used to generate indices to infer the relations of library catalogue entries or web pages to the approximate geological epoch that is covered in a text. This allows, for instance, including stratigraphic age into a catalogue search without the need to specify all possibly relevant terms in complex queries.