Scoring results in a geospatial services search engine according to geographic and semantic awareness

Abstract

Nowadays, there are a huge number of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) offering public spatial services. For this reason, it is very difficult for a user to know what spatial service could satisfy his/her needs. The SDI community now demands an approach for integrating SDI services and relating them with semantic features. In order to contribute to a solution, in this paper we propose an approach based on IR (Information Retrieval) for building a search engine which helps users to find geographical information, available on the Internet, about different concepts located in a particular administrative division. In our approach, a novel algorithm updates an inverted index, taking into account semantic relationships between concepts which are obtained from ontologies. Furthermore, results are sorted by conceptual and geographic criteria fitting the user query.