An Ontology-Based Automatic Approach for Lithologic Correlation

In this paper we present an automatic approach for the lithologic correlation task, which is a crucial task in the domain of Petroleum Geology. In our approach, we consider the lithologic correlation task as formally equivalent to the task of DNA sequence alignment, in the domain of Bioinformatics. This allows us to use well-known sequence alignment algorithms for dealing with this task. Moreover, our approach uses a domain ontology for representing the knowledge about the domain objects. This ensures an agreement regarding the formal vocabulary used for describing the geological objects, allowing us to deal with the data collected by different geologists in a homogeneous way. Finally, we also use clustering techniques for finding groups of geological objects that are sufficiently similar for being correlated by the sequence alignment algorithms. We discuss some results of the application of our approach to a real dataset.