Geo-Enrichment and Semantic Enhancement of Metadata Sets to Augment Discovery in Geoportals

Abstract

Abstract:Geoportals are established to function as main gateways to find, evaluate, and start "using" geographic information. Still, current geoportal implementations face problems in optimizing the discovery process due to semantic heterogeneity issues, which leads to low recall and low precision in performing text-based searches. Therefore, we propose an enhanced semantic discovery approach that supports multilingualism and information domain context. Thus, we present workflow that enriches existing structured metadata with synonyms, toponyms, and translated terms derived from user-defined keywords based on multilingual thesauri and ontologies. To make the results easier and understandable, we also provide automated translation capabilities for the resource metadata to support the user in conceiving the thematic content of the descriptive metadata, even if it has been documented using a language the user is not familiar with. In addition, to text-enable spatial filtering capabilities, we add additional location name keywords to metadata sets. These are based on the existing bounding box and shall tweak discovery scores when performing single text line queries. In order to improve the user's search experience, we tailor faceted search strategies presenting an enhanced query interface for geo-metadata discovery that are transparently leveraging the underlying thesauri and ontologies.

Employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques for Improving the Discovery of Geospatial Resources on the Web

“…Geoportals of today are mainly built on OGC's CSW [3], which was not designed to be crawled by web search engines [5], i.e., any CSW-accessible metadata is not indexed by search engines. Publishing geospatial metadata in HTML pages leads to increased web traffic to geoportals where the relevant geospatial data can be further explored, accessed or downloaded.…”

“…People in geographic information communities may know this, but what about those outside these communities who want to use geospatial data in their domains of expertise? Furthermore, current geoportals are mainly built on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) [3]. The CSW provides an HTTP binding, designed to enable "the discovery and retrieval of spatial data and services metadata" [4]; it was not designed to be crawled by web search engines [5] and is therefore part of the "Deep Web", i.e., online content inaccessible to Web crawlers.…”

GIS Application to Regional Geological Structure Relationship Modelling Considering Semantics

“…A GIS model for a geological relationship is based on semantics [45,46], and it integrates geological geometrical features and relationships to unify the geometry, semantics, and geological structures [47]. This paper generalizes geological phenomena into three levels of geological objects and then into geological spatial objects based on both the structured text expressions of geological spatial relationships presented in Ref.…”

Web-Scale Normalization of Geospatial Metadata Based on Semantics-Aware Data Sources

“…Our methodology endorses the latter approach, but applies to metadata instead of data. Vockner et al [46] present a similar approach, but concentrate on cross-language information retrieval (the simpler of the use cases presented in this section). It also hints at the importance of user context (based on IP-based location and language settings), while our approach encompasses a more holistic notion of context (the third use case in Figure 2) that is derived from user profiles.…”