Ontology-driven compilation of geological map database

This note presents an ontology-driven method for the representation of knowledge in the geological maps. The OntoGeonous ontology for the geological knowledge, obtained from the encoding of the international standards (e.g., GeoScienceML and INSPIRE), has addressed the design of a geodatabase, named OntoGeoBase. Axioms and formal conditions drive the description of the feature properties in the database structure and thus constrain the data entry process. This paper illustrates the advantages of this method, namely the standard-compliant description of the items of a geological map and the fleshing out of the relations between the items of the map, with the geologic event as a description key. An example (based on an ideal geological map drawn “ad hoc”) shows how this system can help in the reduction of the amount of implicit knowledge and of the ambiguities in the reading of a geological map.