Semantically triggered qualitative simulation of a geological process

Abstract

The field of geology has been the subject of a range of research efforts aiming to formalize geological domain knowledge, notably through geological domain ontologies. The main focus of existing geological ontologies primarily lies in describing static geological objects and their properties, paying less attention to the knowledge concerning geological processes and events. Meanwhile, the geological process modeling and simulation predominantly rely on quantitative numerical approaches that necessitate comprehensive and abundant data as input. However, many geological processes took place on a million-year time scale with insufficient data and non-direct observations. Given the inherent incompleteness of geological data, geologists still rely on qualitative reasoning to validate their interpretations. There is currently a dearth of applicable methods to facilitate qualitative reasoning and simulate geological processes based on domain knowledge.

We propose to model the effects of a geological process through an object-oriented program, while keeping an ontological representation of the situation at each instant. To combine the two models, we propose using semantically defined ‘process triggers.’ These process triggers are defined as part of the ontology, in accordance with the Basic Formal Ontology. They enable geologists to describe the precise moment when a geological process is triggered and initiated. On the computational program side, we employ the ‘Semantic Micro Object Language’ to embody the knowledge and rules provided by geologists, facilitating the simulation of geological processes. Through an evaluation experiment, our proposed approach demonstrates promising results within a reasonable timeframe. As proof of concept, we have applied our method to a real-world scenario of petroleum thermal maturation in Ekofisk Field and got a promising result. Our approach provides a formalism that allows a powerful code to interact with domain ontologies, which paves the path for future knowledge reasoning.