A Chronostratigraphic Relational Database Ontology

A chronostratigraphic research database was donated by British Petroleum to the Stratigraphy Group at the Energy and Geoscience Institute (EGI), University of Utah. These data consists of over 2,000 measured sections representing over three decades of research into the application of the graphic correlation method. The data are global and includes both microfossil (foraminifera, calcareous nannoplankton, spores, pollen, dinoflagellate cysts, etc) and macrofossil data. The objective of the donation was to make the research data available to the public in order to encourage additional chronostratigraphy studies, specifically regarding graphic correlation. As part of the National Science Foundation's Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences (GEON) initiative these data have been made available to the public at http://css.egi.utah.edu. To encourage further research using the graphic correlation method, EGI has developed a software package, StrataPlot that will soon be publicly available from the GEON website as a standalone software download. The EGI chronostratigraphy research database, although relatively large, has many data holes relative to some paleontological disciplines and geographical areas, so the challenge becomes how do we expand the data available for chronostratigrahic studies using graphic correlation. There are several public or soon-to-be public databases available to chronostratigraphic research, but they have their own data structures and modes of presentation. The heterogeneous nature of these database schemas hinders their integration and makes it difficult for the user to retrieve and consolidate potentially valuable chronostratigraphic data. The integration of these data sources would facilitate rapid and comprehensive data searches, thus helping advance studies in chronostratigraphy. The GEON project will host a number of databases within the geology domain, some of which contain biostratigraphic data. Ontologies are being developed to provide an integrated query system for the searching across GEON's biostratigraphy databases, as well as databases available in the public domain. Although creating an ontology directly from the existing database metadata would have been effective and straightforward, our effort was directed towards creating a more efficient representation of our database, as well as a general representation of the biostratigraphic domain.