Extending SUMO to geological times

Abstract

One of the challenges of Natural Language Processing of Oil&Gas domain is reasoning with geological times. Although there are some initiatives for specifying the vocabulary of this information, they fall short on enforcement of expected properties, such as no overlapping between Ages (Epoch, Eras etc) and hierarchy compliance. We used the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its associated automated reasoning tools to tackle these matters and uncovered some inconsistencies on geological time International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICC) official published material.