Enhancing the online discovery of geospatial data through taxonomy, folksonomy and semantic annotations

Abstract

Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are meant to facilitatedissemination and consumption of spatial data, amongst others, throughpublication and discovery of spatial metadata in geoportals. However,geoportals are often known to geoinformation communities only andpresent technological limitations which make it difficult for generalpurpose web search engines to discover and index the data catalogued in(or registered with) a geoportal. The mismatch between standard spatialmetadata content and the search terms that Web users employ when lookingfor spatial data, presents a further barrier to spatial data discovery.The need arises for creating and sharing spatial metadata that isdiscoverable by general purpose web search engines and users alike.Using folksonomies and semantic annotations appears as an option toeliminate the mismatch and to publish the metadata for discovery on theWeb. Based on an analysis of search query terms employed when searchingfor spatial data on the Web, a taxonomy of search terms is constructed.The taxonomy constitutes the basis towards understanding how webresources in general, and HTML pages with standard spatial metadata inparticular, can be documented so that they are discoverable by generalpurpose web search engines. We illustrate the use of the constructedtaxonomy in semantic annotation of web resources, such as HTML pageswith spatial metadata on the Web.