Item talk:Q44143
Mining Facility in SWEET
One of the things I'm experimenting with is the alignment of concepts we are bringing into the GeoKB with the SWEET ontology. SWEET is a formal classification system originally developed by Bob Raskin and others at NASA and now maintained as a community resource via ESIP. It provides a broad base of describing the world that could be a useful rallying point for us to tie in with through this work, both in terms of pulling in related concepts we need to link with and in contributing from our work here.
This particular concept of Mining Facility ties in reasonably well with the Structure > Facility > Mining Facility set of concepts in SWEET, though we might differ a bit in how it classifies above that level. It is useful to work what we are doing into SWEET in that we may want to tie in with other types of facilities from other domains also rallying around this community semantic resource.
Mining Classification
One of the things we need to work out is how the concepts we need in the GeoKB related to mines/mining facilities are mapped in the GeoKB and related to formal ontologies. As we look to incorporate information about mines from the USMIN work and MRDS, we will need to develop some further linked concepts here in the GeoKB that can accommodate data/information in those systems.
A key aspect of this is the Ftr_Type attribute in the USMIN dataset of prospects mine-related features. The metadata lists the domain values for this key classification property with definitions. Most of them point to the reference, American Geological Institute, 1997, Dictionary of mining, mineral, and related terms, 2nd Ed. Some definitions for these terms include notes about the way USMIN producers aligned features pulled from topographic map symbols/annotation. There are also several domain values for Ftr_Type that USMIN authors introduced themselves with definitions included.
The AGI source does not represent a fully qualified and organized classification system, but is rather a vocabulary source. I did find a few cases of "mineral exploration ontologies" being developed to support semantic reasoning experiments, but I have not yet found a mature resource to operate against for GeoKB purposes. In the near term, incorporating the most mature USGS source (USMIN) seems a reasonable course.
We may start with simply pulling in the Ftr_Type domain values as stated, organizing them simply as subclasses of mining facilities for the time being. Some of these are more specific classifications than the very simplistic "mine" features that we pulled in from the GNIS source and now need to refine within the GeoKB.
