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• MetadataTopicHarmo_poster.pdf

Poster presented at the 2015 All Hands Meeting.

Geoportals provide integrated access to geospatial resources, and enable both authorities and the general public to contribute and share data and services. An essential goal of geoportals is to facilitate the discovery of the available resources. Such process heavily relies on the quality of metadata. While multiple metadata standards have been established, data contributers may adopt different standards when sharing their data via the same geoportal. This is especially the case for user-generated content where various terms and topics can be introduced to describe similar datasets. While this heterogeneity provides a wealth of perspectives, it also complicates resource discovery. With the fast development of the Semantic Web technologies, there is a rise of Linked-Data-driven portals. Although these novel portals open up new ways to organizing metadata and retrieving resources, they lack effective semantic search methods. This paper addresses the two challenges discussed above, namely the topic heterogeneity brought by multiple metadata standards as well as the lack of established semantic search in Linked-Data-driven geoportals. This work is directly related to the GeoLink project in the EarthCube program, since GeoLink needs to semantically harmonize the heterogenous datasets collected by multiple researchers and organizations. Meanwhile, there is also a general need to facilitate resource discovery given the current huge amount of data managed in the EarthCube projects.

Suggested Citation: 

Hu, Y. (2015), Metadata Topic Harmonization and Semantic Search for Linked-Data-Driven Geoportals. Presented at EarthCube All Hands Meeting, Washington, DC, 27-29 May 2015. http://earthcube.org/document/2015/metadata-topic-harmonization-semantic-search