Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information

Last updated
CGI
Non-governmental, non-profit agency
Industry Geology Organizations
Area served
Global
Key people
Francois Robida(Chair)
Kristine Asch (Secretary)
Robert Tomas(Treasurer)
Parent International Union of Geological Sciences
Website http://www.cgi-iugs.org

The Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI), usually referred to by the unofficial "Commission for Geoscience Information" is subcommittee grade scientific organization that concerns itself with geological standard, information management and interoperability matters on a global scale.

Geology The study of the composition, structure, physical properties, and history of Earths components, and the processes by which they are shaped.

Geology is an earth science concerned with the solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Geology can also refer to the study of the solid features of any terrestrial planet or natural satellite such as Mars or the Moon. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other earth sciences, including hydrology and the atmospheric sciences, and so is treated as one major aspect of integrated earth system science and planetary science.

A technical standard is an established norm or requirement in regard to technical systems. It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes, and practices. In contrast, a custom, convention, company product, corporate standard, and so forth that becomes generally accepted and dominant is often called a de facto standard.

Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposition through archiving or deletion.

Contents

About

The Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) is a working subcommittee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. The Commission meets usually annually, and at the quadrennial meetings scheduled by the IUGS at the International Geological Congress.

International Union of Geological Sciences

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the field of geology.

The Commission is the governing body responsible for the XML-based exchange languages Geoscience Markup Language (GeoSciML - in collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium) and EarthResource Markup Language (EarthResourceML). The CGI and its members also play a significant role in the OneGeology initiative.

GeoSciML or Geoscience Markup Language is a GML Application Schema that can be used to transfer information about geology, with an emphasis on the "interpreted geology" that is conventionally portrayed on geologic maps. Its feature-type catalogue includes Geologic Unit, Mapped Feature, Earth Material, Geologic Structure, and specializations of these, as well as Borehole and other observational artefacts. It was created by, and is governed by, the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) to support interoperability of information served from Geologic Surveys and other data custodians. It will be used in the OneGeology project, an effort to create a geological map of the entire Earth, served live by merging data from many national geological surveys.

Open Geospatial Consortium standards organization

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing.

OneGeology is an international collaborative project in the field of geology supported by 113 countries, UNESCO and major global geoscience bodies. It is an International Year of Planet Earth flagship initiative that aims to enable online access to dynamic digital geological map of the world for everyone. The project uses the newly introduced GeoSciML markup language and initially targets a scale of approximately 1:1 million. Downstream uses could be to identify areas suitable for mining, oil and gas exploration or areas at risk from landslides or earthquakes, to help understanding of formations which store groundwater for drinking or irrigation, and to help locate porous rocks suitable for burying emissions of greenhouse gases. The project portal was launched on August 6, 2008 at the 33rd International Geological Congress (IGC) in Oslo, Norway.

Aims

The Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) mission is to enable the global exchange of knowledge about geoscience information and systems.

Specifically CGI aims to:

Methodology

The Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information has created two working groups, the Interoperability Working Group and the Geoscience Terminology Working Group.

The Interoperability Working Group aims to develop and test relevant and timely geological information standards. The ultimate objective of the working group is to enable seamless web integration of select information hosted at different locations in varied formats. It aims to achieve this by:

Geography Markup Language used to describe geographical features

The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet. Key to GML's utility is its ability to integrate all forms of geographic information, including not only conventional "vector" or discrete objects, but coverages and sensor data.

The Multi-lingual Thesaurus Working Group was formed in 2003 to continue work of the Multhes working group of the 1990s. The goal was to enable the global exchange of geoscience information by establishing a common multilingual core vocabulary by developing and expanding the Multilingual Thesaurus of Geosciences. In 2012, vocabulary development activities of the Interoperability Working Group (the Concept Definition Task Group) were merged with the activities of the Multi-lingual Thesaurus Working Group to form a new Geoscience Terminology Working Group that will organize and coordinate ongoing development of geoscience terminology for use in information exchange.

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Glossary Alphabetical list of terms relevant to a certain field of study or action

A glossary, also known as a vocabulary or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end of a book and includes terms within that book that are either newly introduced, uncommon, or specialized. While glossaries are most commonly associated with non-fiction books, in some cases, fiction novels may come with a glossary for unfamiliar terms.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for security, Internet of Things, energy, content technologies, emergency management, and other areas.

Chemical Markup Language is an approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, first based on a DTD and later on an XML Schema, the most robust and widely used system for precise information management in many areas. It has been developed over more than a decade by Murray-Rust, Rzepa and others and has been tested in many areas and on a variety of machines.

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable easy publication and use of such vocabularies as linked data.

The AgMES initiative was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and aims to encompass issues of semantic standards in the domain of agriculture with respect to description, resource discovery, interoperability and data exchange for different types of information resources.

The Indian Institute of Remote Sensing is a premier institute for research, higher education and training in the field of Remote Sensing, Geoinformatics and GPS Technology for Natural Resources, Environmental and Disaster Management under the Indian Department of Space, which was established in the year 1966. It is located in the city of Dehradun, Uttarakhand.

ISO/TC 37 organization

ISO/TC 37 is a technical committee within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that prepares standards and other documents concerning methodology and principles for terminology and language resources.

An Emotion Markup Language has first been defined by the W3C Emotion Incubator Group (EmoXG) as a general-purpose emotion annotation and representation language, which should be usable in a large variety of technological contexts where emotions need to be represented. Emotion-oriented computing is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format; in this case a markup language is used.

The Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) is a suite of XML-based messaging standards that facilitate emergency information sharing between government entities and the full range of emergency-related organizations. EDXL standardizes messaging formats for communications between these parties. EDXL was developed as a royalty-free standard by the OASIS International Open Standards Consortium.

ISO 25964 is the international standard for thesauri, published in two parts as follows:

ISO 25964 Information and documentation - Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabulariesPart 1: Thesauri for information retrieval [published August 2011]  Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies [published March 2013]

WaterML is a technical standard and information model used to represent hydrological time series structures. The current version is WaterML 2.0, released an open standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Enterprise Architect (software) visual modeling and design tool based on the OMG UML

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In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects and infrastructure efforts since then.

Lesley Wyborn is an Australian geoscientist and geoinformatics specialist, with a focus in high performance computing for geography and online analytics. She is an Adjunct Fellow at the Australian National University.

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