Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
|
Corresponding author: Björn Kröger (bjorn.kroger@helsinki.fi)
Received: 07 Jun 2019 | Published: 18 Jun 2019
© 2019 Björn Kröger, Kari Lintulaakso
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: Kröger B, Lintulaakso K (2019) The Problem of Stratigraphical Time Grouping of Earth Science Data. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e36981. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.36981
|
|
An essential aspect of earth science data is the age they represent. The age, in most cases, is not a simple time stamp measured in years, but often specified as a stratigraphic interval or unit. Numerous schemes exist for age attribution in geological data, referring to various methods of e.g. biostratigraphy, chronostratigraphy, sequence-stratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy. Furthermore, opinions about the relationships between the stratigraphical units differ from author to author and are in a steady historical flux. New stratigraphic units become established and old ones are abandoned. This is a challenge for databases that rely on fixed standards.
However, all stratigraphic schemes can be conceptualized as a system of unique names related by opinions and expressed in publications. A database (http://rnames.luomus.fi) linking the names of stratigraphic units with referenced (published) opinions would allow for the development of dynamic models for time grouping based on explicit algorithms. We will present and discuss our database approach to tackle this problem.
stratigraphy, earth science collections, database
Björn Kröger
Biodiversity_Next 2019