DDE-TS: A semantic service for geologic time

Abstract

Age is an important property in geologic data. It can tell us when a geologic event happened, how long did the event last. And it is important to know the sequence of events to consider the causation between these events. On the other hand, same set of data with different ages, paleogeographic data can be interpreted totally different. There are lots of geologic terms related to age: magnetostratigraphy (e.g. “Brunhes”), biostratigraphy (e.g. “Conosphaera”), lithostratigraphy (“Eagle Ford Formation”), geologic time concepts (“Cretaceous”), etc. This information are buried almost all geologic literatures. It is crucial to interpret these data as age. However, these geologic time data are heterogenous in literatures. For example, the age of “Cretaceous” in the literatures of year 1990 are different from that of year 2020, because the interpreted age of these concepts are evolving as techniques and the their studies are pushing the geologic time related terms being more accurate and precise. Thus, how to fast interpret the large amount of geologic time related terms are crucial for data mining in data-driven discovery of geoscience. Here we created a semantic service of geologic time related terms (age), named DDE-TS, which is supported by the Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) program. This service includes knowledge graph of these geologic time related terms and tools to use this service. It can solve the problem of interoperability and reusability of geologic time related terms in literatures.