Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma is a data science and geoinformatics researcher who works in the joint field of computer science and Earth and environmental sciences. His research interests include (1) Qualitative and quantitative modeling of complex systems in Earth and environmental sciences; (2) Data interoperability and provenance enablement through participatory approaches and semantic technologies; and (3) Exploratory visualization of spatio-temporal features in Big and Small Data.
The high-precision observation and measurement techniques have accelerated the rapid development of geoscience research in the past decades and have produced large amounts of research outputs. Many findings and discoveries were recorded in the geological literature, which is regarded as unstructured data. For these data, traditional research methods have limited functions for integrating and mining them to make knowledge discovery. Text mining based on natural language processing (NLP) provides the necessary method and technology to analyze unstructured geological literature. In this book chapter, we will review the latest researches of text mining in the domain of geoscience and present results from a few case studies. The research includes three major parts: (1) structuralization of geological literature, (2) information extraction and visualization for geological literature, and (3) geological text mining to assist database construction and knowledge discovery.
Part of the book: Cyberspace