Summary

Context: Establishing the mechanisms (services, registries and repositories) and technologies (encoding, formal representation) that support the maintainance and management of the manifold of resources, terms, concepts and relations between the scientific communities and thus enables a seamless integration of any information on the one hand and far-reaching interoperability (e.g. correlation of geological maps) across system domain boundaries on the other hand.

User Stories and Stakeholder Requirements

1. Provision of a knowledge management that supports a scientist in retrieving and processing information from geographically distributed and heterogeneous Borehole Information Systems In order to retrieve information from geographically distributed and heterogeneous systems, it is essential to establish common vocabularies that specify the terms, which are needed to identify the desired information across system and domain boundaries. A geologist for example is interested in boreholes that have reached a horizon of a certain age. According information is often encoded via the term “lastHorizon”, which however is not common among all of the various communities within the various drilling domains. Moreover, the information itself like the chrono or lithostratigraphical assignment varies significantly for example across German state boundaries.
2. Harmonisation and Mapping of geological information across system, domain and states boundaries

Use Cases

1. Calibration and Mapping of geological logs regarding stratigraphic and lithological terms across both, domain and state geological borders in a Scientific Infrastructure
2. Harmonisation of Vocabularies

Requirements

1. Agreed upon Dictionaries and Vocabularies (Code-Lists)
2. All Vocabularies shall be available via common and well-known encodings
3. The Infrastructure shall provide a Registry for Dictionaries and Vocabularies that can be accessed via standardised services.
4. The Infrastructure shall provide a service for the automated transformation and mapping of encodings of Vocabularies used in different states and domains
5. If common Vocabularies are not established, Thesauri and Gazetteers have to be provided

Test Cases

1. Mapping of two artificially created borehole logs using lithological terms from different states or domains and creation of a new Log based on a harmonised vocabulary
2. Searching for boreholes, in which the drilled “last horizon” has an age greater than the Tertiary
3. Searching for boreholes with a “final depth” greater than 5000m

Terms

Concept/Feature: (Semantic) Registry

Definition

Based on Ontologies and Domain Controlled Vocabularies a Registry supports the seamless exchange of information across system and domain boundaries. A simple example is the RDF/XML-based representation of geological structures (e.g. the basis of the Tertiary) that have been sampled (e.g., drill core analysis) during certain drilling campaigns (e.g., exploration) located in certain areas (e.g., preliminary examinations on mineral deposits) ... an so on. Within such a Registry all kind of resources are maintained and managed on the basis of formal statements about their context and relationsships. According statements are available for example via the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Access to all information should be available only via services on the basis of Representational State Transfer (REST) concept.

Properties/Attributes

Interopability

From Wikipedia: "Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, at present or in the future, in either implementation or access, without any restrictions". In the context of exchanging information between different geoscientific domains, interoperability requires at least a common and agreed upon vocabulary. However, an implementation of all facets of the interfaces used (e.g. encoding, information structure, etc. ) is preferable. Currently a great variety of different interfaces makes a true interoperbility nearly impossible, even if only regarding the exchange of borehole related information.

Properties/Attributes

REST

"Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, termed RESTful web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations." (Wikipedia)

Properties/Attributes

Sensor Web Enablement

"Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) is a suite of standards developed and maintained by Open Geospatial Consortium. SWE standards enable developers to make all types of sensors, transducers and sensor data repositories discoverable, accessible and usable via the Web." (Wikipedia); SWE already implements the mechanisms for establishing a Semantic Registry. It offers the possibility to comprehensively describe all facets of resources (e.g., sensors), related data and according semantic information based on a basic and common set of structurinng elements and qualifying information retrievable from vocabularies. Moreover it supports a separation of data, semantics and metadata to the greatest possible extent

Properties/Attributes

RDF

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats. It is also used in knowledge management applications.

Concept/Feature: Ontology

Definition

In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains. (Wikipedia)

Properties/Attributes

Correlation

see: https://github.com/opengeospatial/boreholeie/wiki/(Use-Case-Vocabulary)-Correlation

Concept/Feature: Domain Controlled Vocabulary

Definition

From Wikipedia: "The Tertiary is the former term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.58 million years ago, a timespan that occurs between the superseded Secondary period and the Quaternary. The Tertiary is no longer recognized as a formal unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, but the word is still widely used. The traditional span of the Tertiary has been divided between the Paleogene and Neogene periods and extends to the first stage of the Pleistocene Epoch." Maintaining such terms in context-oriented and hierarchical organised dictionaries supports scientists in discovering the Correlation of information without the necessity to adjust their search accordingly on client side.

Properties/Attributes

Term

A Term is an entry in a vocabulary. From Wikipedia: "Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words or multi-word expressions that in specific contexts are given specific meanings—these may deviate from the meanings the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language."