Carbonate Ontology and Its Application for Integrating Microfacies Data

Carbonate rocks record essential information on changes in paleoclimate and paleoceanography. Abundant geological and geochemical data of carbonate rocks have been accumulated over the past decades;however, most of the data are stored in the published literature with highly unstructured forms, and are thus difficult to reuse. The ontology is a standard knowledge model for data integration, which can promote data storage and reutilization. This study proposes a carbonate ontology that represents the concepts in carbonate microfacies. The carbonate ontology constructed by the top-down process contains 215 terms of classifications and petrographic descriptions of carbonate rocks. Furthermore, carbonate microfacies of the Cretaceous(Aptian) carbonate platform in the Betic Cordillera and Jurassic carbonate platform in Tibet provide the data from case studies for the testing and initial validation of the proposed ontology. The carbonate ontology is under continuous expansion following the bottom-up approach and open access on the website of the deep-time digital Earth(DDE) program.