Linked Geoscience Data in practice: where W3C standards meet domain knowledge, data visualization and OGC standards

The geoscience community is now facing both the challenge and the opportunity caused by the vast amount of datasets that can be made available on the Web. An efficient “data environment” on the Web has the potential to enable geoscientists to conduct their research in ways that never existed before. Standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium have already been used widely to build data services among different subjects in geosciences. In recent years, the Linked Open Data approach initiated by the World Wide Web Consortium has received increasing attention. In this paper, the author presents a pilot study that uses a domain specific knowledge base and data visualization techniques to leverage the functionality of geoscience data services in the Web of Data. The study focuses on the topic of the geologic time scale. Detailed works such as semantic modeling and encoding, multilingual vocabularies, exploratory data visualization, web map service and processing, and the query of linked data are introduced through real-world datasets. This study faces a broad perspective of the Linked Geoscience Data and leverages the functionalities of existing standards into a new level for geoscience applications.