The CHRONOS System: geoinformatics for sedimentary geology and paleobiology>sup<*>/sup< (original) (raw)
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The CHRONOS System: geoinformatics for sedimentary geology and paleobiology
Local to Global Data Interoperability - Challenges and Technologies, 2005
Traditionally, scientists have captured data on the history of Earth processes in the printed literature where the data sets, by the nature of the medium, are incomplete. The answer to this "information bottleneck" is geoinformatics, a revolution that is migrating information to more readily retrievable electronic formats. The Chronos system is a community facility that addresses the geoinformatics needs of
Computers & Geosciences, 2009
CHRONOS's purpose is to transform Earth history research by seamlessly integrating stratigraphic databases and tools into a virtual on-line stratigraphic record. In this paper, we describe the various components of CHRONOS's distributed data system, including the encoding of semantic and descriptive data into a service-based architecture. We give examples of how we have integrated well-tested resources available from the opensource and geoinformatic communities, like the GeoSciML schema and the simple knowledge organization system (SKOS), into the services-oriented architecture to encode timescale and phylogenetic synonymy data. We also describe on-going efforts to use geospatially enhanced data syndication and informally including semantic information by embedding it directly into the XHTML Document Object Model (DOM). XHTML DOM allows machine-discoverable descriptive data such as licensing and citation information to be incorporated directly into data sets retrieved by users.
[PDF] The future of the past in the present: biodiversity informatics and geological time
The biological and palaeontological communities have approached the problem of informatics separately, creating a divide between communities that is both technological and sociological in nature. In this paper we describe one new advance towards solving this problem -expanding the Scratchpads platform to deal with geological time. In creating this system we have attempted to make our work open to existing communities by providing a webservice of geological time data via the GBIF Vocabularies site. We have also ensured that our system can adapt to changes in the definition of geological time intervals and is capable of querying datasets independently of the format of geological age data used.
The future of the past in the present: biodiversity informatics and geological time
ZooKeys, 2011
The biological and palaeontological communities have approached the problem of informatics separately, creating a divide between communities that is both technological and sociological in nature. In this paper we describe one new advance towards solving this problem -expanding the Scratchpads platform to deal with geological time. In creating this system we have attempted to make our work open to existing communities by providing a webservice of geological time data via the GBIF Vocabularies site. We have also ensured that our system can adapt to changes in the definition of geological time intervals and is capable of querying datasets independently of the format of geological age data used.
EARTHTIME: A community-based effort towards high-precision calibration of earth history
Geochmica et Cosmochimica Acta
Geological time is customarily treated as an "independent variable"; deductions and conclusions are made assuming that the geological timescale as given is precise and accurate. Current geological timescales are based on data of variable quality, commonly averaging dates obtained by different techniques, with differing (though often ignored) absolute uncertainties. Consequently, the greatest uncertainty in most analyses of geologic and evolutionary rates is the timescale itself. Recent advances in geochronology and correlation methods now allow us to reframe research into the timing and rates of geological and biological processes in deep time, producing a newly calibrated geological timescale with significantly improved accuracy and precision standards commensurate with new and emerging geochronologic and chronostratigraphic methodologies. To address these issues the EARTHTIME initiative has been proposed as a new community-based effort to focus attention on the calibration of at least the last 800 million years of earth history. This will allow earth scientists to address a whole new series of questions that rely on knowledge of precise rates of biological, geological, and climatic change.