Semantically Enabling the Global Geodynamics Project: Incorporating Feature-Based Annotations via XML Pointer Language (XPointer)

Earth science markup language (ESML) is efficient and effective in representing scientific data in an XML-based formalism. However, features of the data being represented are not accounted for in ESML. Such features might derive from events, identifications, or some other source. In order to account for features in an ESML context, they are considered from the perspective of annotation. Although it is possible to extend ESML to incorporate feature-based annotations internally, there are complicating factors identified that apply to ESML and most XML dialects. Rather than pursue the ESML-extension approach, an external representation for feature-based annotations via XML pointer language (XPointer) is developed. In previous work, it has been shown that it is possible to extract relationships from ESML-based representations, and capture the results in the resource description format (RDF). Application of this same requirement to XPointer-based annotations of ESML representations results in a revised semantic framework for the global geodynamics project (GGP).