Visual Interpretation of Events in Petroleum Geology

In visual domains, the tasks are accomplished through intensive use of visual knowledge. In this paper, we are interested in the visual interpretation task, which is prevalent in many visual domains. We investigate the role played by foundational ontologies in reasoning processes that deals with visual information, as those that are performed in visual interpretation tasks. We propose an approach for visual interpretation that combines ontologically well founded domain ontologies, a reasoning model, and a cognitively well founded meta-model for representation of inferential knowledge. Our approach was effectively applied in the task of visual interpretation of depositional processes, within the Sedimentary Stratigraphy domain.