Semantics-Aware Indexing of Geospatial Resources Based on Multilingual Thesauri: Methodology and Preliminary Results

Despite the structured nature of metadata associated with geospatial resources, the discovery functionality implemented by geoportals is primarily based on the syntactic matching of users’ search pattern against descriptive metadata, such as title, abstract, or keywords. As a consequence, the retrieval process is often hampered by linguistic issues related to multilingualism, semantic heterogeneity (synonymy, homonymy, etc.), and terminology mismatch in general. We propose a novel criterion for associating resources to language-neutral identifiers, thus enabling multilingual access to datasets and services as well as query expansion and refinement. The methodology has been successfully applied to the ISOcompliant metadata records aggregated by the INSPIRE Geoportal and is driving semantics-aware extensions of the discovery functionalities of the latter.