Geoscience knowledge graph in the big data era

Since the beginning of the 21 st century,the geoscience research has been entering a significant transitional period with the establishment of a new knowledge system as the core and with the drive of big data as the means.It is a revolutionary leap in the research of geoscience knowledge discovery from the traditional encyclopedic discipline knowledge system to the computer-understandable and operable knowledge graph.Based on adopting the graph pattern of general knowledge representation,the geoscience knowledge graph expands the unique spatiotemporal features to the Geoscience knowledge,and integrates geoscience knowledge elements,such as map,text,and number,to establish an all-domain geoscience knowledge representation model.A federated,crowd intelligence-based collaborative method of constructing the geoscience knowledge graph is developed here,which realizes the construction of high-quality professional knowledge graph in collaboration with global geo-scientists.We also develop a method for constructing a dynamic knowledge graph of multi-modal geoscience data based on in-depth text analysis,which extracts geoscience knowledge from massive geoscience literature to construct the latest and most complete dynamic geoscience knowledge graph.A comprehensive and systematic geoscience knowledge graph can not only deepen the existing geoscience big data analysis,but also advance the construction of the high-precision geological time scale driven by big data,the compilation of intelligent maps driven by rules and data,and the geoscience knowledge evolution and reasoning analysis,among others.It will further expand the new directions of geoscience research driven by both data and knowledge,break new ground where geoscience,information science,and data science converge,realize the original innovation of the geoscience research and achieve major theoretical breakthroughs in the spatiotemporal big data research.

A unified framework of temporal information expression in geosciences knowledge system

Time is an essential reference system for recording objects,events,and processes in the field of geosciences.There are currently various time references,such as solar calendar,geological time,and regional calendar,to represent the knowledge in different domains and regions,which subsequently entails a time conversion process required to interpret temporal information under different time references.However,the current time conversion method is limited by the application scope of existing time ontologies(e.g.,“Jurassic”is a period in geological ontology,but a point value in calendar ontology)and the reliance on experience in conversion processes.These issues restrict accurate and efficient calculation of temporal information across different time references.To address these issues,this paper proposes a Unified Time Framework(UTF)in the geosciences knowledge system.According to a systematic time element parsing from massive time references,the proposed UTF designs an independent time root node to get rid of irrelevant nodes when accessing different time types and to adapt to the time expression of different geoscience disciplines.Furthermore,this UTF carries out several designs:to ensure the accuracy of time expressions by designing quantitative relationship definitions;to enable time calculations across different time elements by designing unified time nodes and structures,and to link to the required external ontologies by designing adequate interfaces.By comparing the time conversion methods,the experiment proves the UTF greatly supports accurate and efficient calculation of temporal information across different time references in SPARQL queries.Moreover,it shows a higher and more stable performance of temporal information queries than the time conversion method.With the advent of the Big Data era in the geosciences,the UTF can be used more widely to discover new geosciences knowledge across different time references.