Geo-enrichment and semantic enhancement of metadata sets to augment discovery in geoportals

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.