Ontology-driven compilation of geological map database

This note presents an ontology-driven method for therepresentation of knowledge in the geological maps. The OntoGeonousontology for the geological knowledge, obtained from the encodingof the international standards (e.g., GeoScienceML and INSPIRE),has addressed the design of a geodatabase, named OntoGeoBase.Axioms and formal conditions drive the description of the featureproperties in the database structure and thus constrain the data entryprocess. This paper illustrates the advantages of this method, namelythe standard-compliant description of the items of a geological mapand the fleshing out of the relations between the items of the map,with the geologic event as a description key. An example (based onan ideal geological map drawn "ad hoc") shows how this system canhelp in the reduction of the amount of implicit knowledge and of theambiguities in the reading of a geological map.