The paper presents the principles of organization of an information environment providing a holistic view of the subject area and various aspects of scientific activity in active seismology. The subject ontology “Active Seismology” is used as a conceptual basis and information model.
Since the 1970s a new direction in geophysics has been developing, which has recently been called active
seismology, based on powerful controlled vibration sources of seismic waves of the low-frequency range [
The use of such sources has opened up new possibilities for investigations of the deep structure of Earth's crust and upper mantle and the geodynamic processes in earthquake-prone and volcanic zones. The active seismology methods have found application in new areas of geophysics and geophysical engineering. Currently, the following new vibrational geotechnologies are being actively developed: active vibroseismic monitoring of earthquake-prone and volcanic zones; vibroseismic action on oil formations to increase oil recovery; vibrational microseismic zoning; study of the stability of deep structures in areas of construction and operation of environmentally hazardous constructions, etc. transverse velocities of elastic waves, the elastic medium density, and the geometry of the object of study) are used. The final representation of the Earth model is completed by interpretations (seismic interpretation, geological and geophysical interpretation, stratigraphic correlations, etc.)
These problems integrate successive stages of interpretation and modeling performed by professionals of different qualifications (geophysicists, seismologists, geologists). This raises the problem of explicit presentation of all data, interpretations and representations related to the process of modeling of specific geological objects. In this paper, a solution to this challenge by formalizing and integrating the knowledge and data on the basis of ontologies is proposed. 2
In recent years, ontological models have been increasingly used to integrate scientific knowledge. Much attention
of the Earth science community has been given to defining ontologies for geological knowledge. In particular,
ontologies based on geological knowledge can now be found on geological maps [
To integrate the knowledge of active seismology, we perform ontological engineering of the subject area [
The ontology “Active Seismology” is based on a method [
Specific classes of the ontology of scientific activity in active seismology are Expedition Works and Field Experiments. In addition to a set of concepts, the ontology has a set of binary links (relations) between the concepts and a set of instances of classes - data records corresponding to a class or relation. Thus, for example, the class Person includes an object Sobisevich Leonid Evgenievich, who is connected by the relation “heads” with the object Complex ecological-geophysical expedition “Mud Volcanoes of Taman” of the class Expedition Works.
The second basic ontology — the ontology of scientific knowledge — contains the following metaconcepts that define structures for describing the subject area under consideration: Science branch (to typify the research being performed), Research method and Research object (to typify the research methods and objects and the structure for their description), Scientific result (to typify and describe the results of scientific activity), and Means of research (to typify the research equipment). The links between the classes are defined by different types of relations.
Figs. 1 and 2 present fragments of the ontology of objects and means of research, which reflects the structure of the classes “Research object” and “Means of research” and their semantic links with other classes and instances.
On the basis of the ontology, a knowledge portal on active seismology has been developed. 3
The Geophysical Informatics Laboratory of ICM&MG SB RAS has developed an infrastructure to support
research in the field of active seismology. The architecture of this environment can be presented as an Internet
resource consisting of two interacting subsystems. One of them is the scientific information system (SIS) “Active
Seismology” [
The “Active Seismology” portal introduces formal descriptions of the subject area concepts in the form of classes of objects and relations between them, thus setting structures for presenting real objects and their relations. In accordance with this, the data on the portal are presented in the form of a semantic network, that is, as a set of different types of interrelated information objects.
Figure 3 shows the portal page containing a description of an object, Shugo volcano, corresponding to the ontology fragment shown in Figure 1. The information objects are represented on the portal page by hyperlinks. The hyperlinks of the knowledge portal make it possible to go to the SIS page “Active Seismology”. Informative access to systematized knowledge and information resources is provided by the advanced navigation and search tools of the portal, which are also based on the ontology. Fig. 5 presents the example of search results. In this example, we search for publications in which the object of research is the Shugo mud volcano. The hyperlinks allow going to a description of the publications. One of the arguments of the object Publication is the URL address of a full-text article in the Internet; in a particular case it can be a page of the SIS library "Active Seismology".
In this paper, some practical solutions for integrating the scientific concepts in active seismology and related fields of knowledge have been presented. Our solutions are based on the development of ontologies related to the subject area. The presented knowledge portal on active seismology allows linking data obtained in field and computational experiments with detailed information on the activity, persons engaged in the research, and text documents which can be helpful in the subsequent use of the data and interpretation of modeling results.
The ontology development is an iterative process. The above ontology will be supplemented with new concepts with the increasing group of experts engaged in the creation of the ontology. In our opinion, the work done is a first step towards solving the problems of knowledge integration in those Earth sciences which use the results of research in the field of active seismology.