Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Susan Edelstein (shedelst@ncsu.edu), Ben Norton (michaelnorton.ben@gmail.com)
Received: 05 Sep 2023 | Published: 07 Sep 2023
© 2023 Susan Edelstein, Ben Norton
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Edelstein S, Norton B (2023) Semantic Mapping of the Geologic Time Scale: A temporal reference. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e112232. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112232
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The Geologic Time Scale is an ordered hierarchical set of terms representing specific time intervals in Earth's history. The hierarchical structure is correlated to the geologic record and major geologic events in Earth’s history (
Due to spatial and temporal variations in the stratigraphic record, the terminology used in conjunction with geologic time scales is largely inconsistent. For a detailed discussion regarding term use in geologic timescales, see
In this study, we examined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF) published distinct verbatim values for Darwin Core terms in the GeologicalContext Class of Darwin Core to assess the the use of chronostratiphic terms, a process highlighted in
After semantic analysis of the verbatim values (see Table
The verbatim values table (top) contains the number of unique values for each Darwin Core (dwc) term in the original data set. The ICS (gts) terms table (bottom) contains the number of terms by rank in the ICS timescale. These tables provide a quantitative illustration of the high variability in the original data and the scale of the mapping process where, for example, 4,029 verbatim values assigned to the Age rank were mapped to 101 possible terms in the controlled vocabulary. See Table
Value Counts | |
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Term | Counts |
dwc:earliestEonOrLowestEonothem | 245 |
dwc:latestEonOrHighestEonothem | 19 |
dwc:earliestEraOrLowestErathem | 122 |
dwc:latestEraOrHighestErathem | 115 |
dwc:earliestPeriodOrLowestSystem | 515 |
dwc:latestPeriodOrHighestSystem | 153 |
dwc:earliestEpochOrLowestSeries | 1023 |
dwc:latestEpochOrHighestSeries | 529 |
dwc:earliestAgeOrLowestStage | 2690 |
dwc:latestAgeOrHighestStage | 1339 |
gts:Super-Eon | 1 |
gts:Eon | 4 |
gts:Era | 10 |
gts:Sub-period | 2 |
gts:Epoch | 38 |
gts:Age | 101 |
dwc |
Darwin Core |
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ |
gts |
Geologic Timescale model |
http://resource.geosciml.org/ontology/timescale/gts |
controlled vocabularies, stratigraphic record, Darwin Core, geological context, semantic mapping
Susan Edelstein
TDWG 2023