With the growth of the World Wide Web has come the insight that currently available methods for finding and using information on the web are often insufficient. In order to move the Web from a data repository to an information resource, a totally new way of organizing information is needed. The advent of the Semantic Web promises better retrieval methods by incorporating the data's semantics and exploiting the semantics during the search process. Such a development needs special attention from the geospatial perspective so that the particularities of geospatial meaning are captured appropriately. The goal of this project is to advance through basic research and software prototype development the creation the Semantic Geospatial Web by (1) developing multiple spatial and terminological ontologies, each with a formal semantics; (2) representing those semantics and make them available both to machines for processing and to people for understanding; and (3) processing canonical geospatial queries against these ontologies and evaluating the retrieval results based on the match between the semantics of the expressed information need and the available semantics of the information resources and search systems. The results of this research will be a new framework for geospatial information retrieval based on the semantics of spatial and terminological ontologies, along with a software prototype for the Semantic Geospatial Web Testbed that implements this framework. The testbed will include a Web-based module for the discovery, access, and analysis of Web-based semantics. By explicitly representing the role of semantics in different components of the information retrieval process (people, interfaces, search systems, and information resources), we will enable geospatial analysts to retrieve more precisely the data they need, based on the semantics associated with these data.
Last updated on April 4, 2002.
[ Geographic Databases | Spatial Database Research Group | NCGIA Maine ]