Abstract:Digital mine is the only way for the development of mining industry in China. Due to lack of appropriate standards and norms, and different awareness in the field of digital mine among academia and industry insiders, the meaning for digital mine is still unclear. Starting from the nature of mining and removing of views of specialized fields, this paper constructs formal ontology for digital mine and proposes the four levels for it. The ontology clarifies the concept world for digital mine, defines the meaning of concepts and relations clearly, provides a reference for the standard construction for digital mine and provides a unified semantic framework for the integration of heterogeneous mine data. Meanwhile, it can provide formal reasoning knowledge for expert system of digital mine and improve the intelligence and automation while the machine automatically interpreting and processing mine spatial data.

Key words: Digital mine; formalization; ontology; concept world; semantic share