Following what was looking like a potential ‘fork’ in online geoscience taxonomy between the EU OneGeology project and a new US-backed ‘EarthCube’ project (OITJ Jan 2013), we received a clarification on the ontological credentials of OneGeology from John Laxton of the British Geological Survey (BGS).
Laxton notes that underpinning OneGeology is Geosciml, a geological interchange standard based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Geography Markup Language GML and developed by the Commission for Geoscience Information.
Geosciml now offers a degree of semantic interoperability with simple vocabularies for some of the Geosciml concepts which have been implemented in SKOS RDF. These are also available as a ‘vocabulary service’ that illustrates the structure encoded in RDF*. BGS has also implemented the ICS stratigraphic chart in RDF.
Alongside the global OneGeology web map service, another OneGeology-Europe EU-funded project did investigate the extension of OneGeology-Global to achieve a level of semantic harmonisation between the services of the participating European geological surveys. Geosciml is now a component of the Inspire data specification which leverages both the Geosciml data model and vocabularies.
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