add validation constraints on Geo Time scale ontology

[smrgeoinfo]

See discussion at https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/geosciml.org/issues/3#issuecomment-560055646 and https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/geosciml.org/issues/3#issuecomment-521070664

example (informal syntax...): _if (isc:x is time:intervalMetBy isc:y) then (isc:x/time:hasBeginning//time:numericPosition) > (isc:y/time:hasBeginning//time:numericPosition).

These kind of rules will ramify because of all the temporal relations, and the challenge is to determine a minimal set of rules that will maintain consistency in the temporal topology, and the best approach to implementing them...

[arademaker]

We have recently published a paper discussing this issue regarding the expressivity of OWL for encoding constraints. It is only these properties that are poorly axiomatized in OWL, many relations and concepts are just symbols in OWL. For instance, no axiom impost the relation between the concepts/relations from time vocabulary with the SKOS vocabulary.

More at http://arademaker.github.io/bibliography/ontobras-2019.html

BTW, the use of SWRL+OWL could be interesting but it would impose one more format for keeping in sync. Shapes Vocabulary is another alternative https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/.

[dr-shorthair]

There is lots that cannot be expressed in OWL. The set of rules in the underlying OWL-Time are only expressed in text - e.g. If a proper interval T1 is intervalContains another proper interval T2, then the beginning of T1 is before the beginning of T2, and the end of T1 is after the end of T2.

There are many ways that SHACL might be used to test this (true/false) or SPARQL might be used to CONSTRUCT the consequential relations, but that did not get done yet.

[alexandretessarollo]

We can surely add some validations to check for inner [in]consistencies - as @arademaker put it, we recently published a paper doing so by extending SUMO: https://github.com/ontologyportal/sumo/blob/master/GeochronologicTimes.kif

However, we could take one step further and ponder on ways to check for correctness against the official version. Take the Asselian Age, ranging from 298.9+/-0.15 to 293.52+/-0.17: who’s to say those numbers and spelling are correct?

That itself raises another question: what is the official/canonical reference for the Geo Times? The ISC links to different files - pdf and jpg for humans, and many more machine readable. Should one of such files disagree from the others, which should we consider the right one?

[dr-shorthair]

what is the official/canonical reference for the Geo Times? The ISC links to different files - pdf and jpg for humans, and many more machine readable. Should one of such files disagree from the others, which should we consider the right one?

I think the ICS would say that the journal papers for each of the boundaries are the only real point of truth. We did reach out to them early in the piece to propose some kind of syndication or feed, but they were uninterested at the time. What you see at present is a 'best effort' with a lot of manual processing - hence the occasional errors. Your validation assistance is much appreciated.

[arademaker]

The question is how we can actually engage to collaborate on all these ideas and pending issues? I believe one first step would be to separate the ontologies from the website data. Once we have data, contributions to individual repositories would be easier to track, right?

[dr-shorthair]

See https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/geosciml.org/issues/8#issuecomment-573480731

[dr-shorthair]

@alexandretessarollo wrote: "We can surely add some validations to check for inner [in]consistencies"

Yes - that would be nice.