Agenames

A stratigraphic information harvester and text parser

One of the central questions in geosciences is: "How old is it?" Sometimes, even specialists have a hard time to determine the stratigraphic context of a geoscientific publication or discussion.

The International Stratigraphic Guide nicely illustrates the challenges we face: "Any stratigrapher will readily understand if a colleague states that he has been studying the Jurassic, or the Miocene, or the Turonian of some area. However, if only the name of a formation, or of a biostratigraphic zone, or of some other type of more local stratigraphic unit is mentioned, stratigraphers in other part of the world may not be able to recognize even approximately the position of the unit within the stratigraphic column."

Agenames harvests publicly available stratigraphic lexicons in order to create a global index of stratigraphic units. These names of stratigraphic units, their ranks, geographic validity and associations with other units are stored related with information on their chronostratigraphic position.
This index will be used for the Agenames text parser (Ageparser) which will be able to scans documents for stratigraphic terms, thus identify the stratigraphic context of a publication. Ageparser will be used for stratigraphic indexing of large collections of geoscientific documents. It can also be used to analyse metadata of museum collections.
Together with other technologies like "geoparsing" Agenames aims to enable geoscientists to perform 4D (space and time) queries: it will allow to narrow searches to the areas of geographic as well as stratigraphic interest.
Data will be accessible free of charge and will be made available under a creative commons attribution license (cc-by/2.0/de).