CSciBox: An Intelligent Assistant for Dating Ice and Sediment Cores

Abstract:

CSciBox is an integrated software system for the construction and evaluation of age models of paleo-environmental archives. It incorporates a number of data-processing and visualization facilities, ranging from simple interpolation to reservoir-age correction and 14C calibration via the Calib algorithm, as well as a number of firn and ice-flow models. It employs modern database technology to store paleoclimate proxy data and analysis results in an easily accessible and searchable form, and offers the user access to those data and computational elements via a modern graphical user interface (GUI). In the case of truly large data or computations, CSciBox is parallelizable across modern multi-core processors, or clusters, or even the cloud. The code is open source and freely available on github, as are one-click installers for various versions of Windows and Mac OSX. The system's architecture allows users to incorporate their own software in the form of computational components that can be built smoothly into CSciBox workflows, taking advantage of CSciBox's GUI, data importing facilities, and plotting capabilities. To date, BACON and StratiCounter have been integrated into CSciBox as embedded components.

The user can manipulate and compose all of these tools and facilities as she sees fit. Alternatively, she can employ CSciBox's automated reasoning engine, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to explore the gamut of age models and cross-dating scenarios automatically. The automated reasoning engine captures the knowledge of expert geoscientists, and can output a description of its reasoning.