Interpretation and representation in geomodels: the POKIMON ontology for formalizing geomodelling knowledge

With the rapid growth of the development and use of three-dimensional (3D) geological models, understanding their interpretative and representational aspects has become increasingly important. Such understanding will not only clarify key premises, inferences, and conclusions, but also enable more informed applications. Yet the epistemic foundations are often opaque. Critical information about assumptions, conceptual structures, reasoning steps, and uncertainties often remains tacit in the mind of the geomodeller, and this lack of transparency hampers explainability, reproducibility, and broader utility. Current practices therefore limit trust, knowledge transfer, and automation in geomodelling workflows. To address these limitations, we develop the POKIMON ontology, designed to make explicit the expert knowledge underlying 3D geological models. POKIMON provides a formalized framework to represent how geological and geomodelling concepts are applied during model construction. Motivating use-cases, the ontological structure, and application to the use-cases are presented to demonstrate utility and to advance automated knowledge-driven 3D geomodelling.