Semantic integration in geosciences

We present an approach for the semantic integration of geoscience data, and a system implementing this approach. Specifically, we demonstrate the use of data ontologies and application of markup languages for semantic integration of data and services. We introduce a domain level object ontology, called Earth and Planetary ONTology (EPONT) to explore, extract, and integrate information from heterogeneous geologic data sets. As proof of concept, we define the DIA engine, an extensible infrastructure for the Discovery, Integration, and Analysis of geoscience data, tools, and services. DIA provides a collaborative environment where scientists can share their resources (e.g., geochemical data, filtering services, etc.) by registering them through well-defined ontologies. We envision the DIA infrastructure to also use other classes of ontologies, namely process and service, for knowledge creation.