Research on Faceted Search Method for Water Data Catalogue Service

Abstract

Traditionally the data retrieval is achieved by searching the metadata with keywords, though it is often difficult for ordinary users to express professional and precise query demands in the water industry. Regarding this issue, this paper introduces an exploratory retrieval method called faceted search by gradually recommending relevant facets to the users. Firstly, a unified modeling algorithm is proposed to construct the unified metadata model in XML for heterogeneous water metadata. Based on this model, candidate facet terms can be extracted and filtered, in order to retrieve the various water metadata uniformly. At last, a facet recommendation algorithm is proposed to help the users to sharpen their queries by prompting less but more accurate facets as the search gets deeper, after excluding those "irrelevant facets" and "redundant facets". The experimental results demonstrate that our facet recommendation algorithm can significantly improve the retrieval precision on querying the water data.