A retrieval method for earth science data based on integrated use of Wikipedia and domain ontology

Abstract

Due to the recent advancement in observation technologies and progress in information technologies, the total amount of earth science data has increased at an explosive pace. However, it is not easy to search and discover earth science data because earth science requires high degree of expertness. In this paper, we propose a retrieval method for earth science data which can be used by non-experts such as scientists from other field, or students interested in earth science. In order to retrieve relevant data sets from a query, which may not include technical terminologies, supplementing terms are extracted by utilizing knowledge bases; Wikipedia and domain ontology. We evaluated our method using actual earth science data. The data, the queries, and the relevance assessments for our experiments were made by the researchers of earth science. The results of our experiments show that our method has achieved good recall and precision. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.