| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
Geospatial Web (GeoWeb) represents the collection of Web resources that contain geospatial components, such as maps, geocoded images, Web services hosting geospatial data, etc. Similar to general Web resources, GeoWeb resources are scattered on Internet, where the identification and integration of GeoWeb resources become a challenging task. To facilitate geospatial resource discovery, we need GeoWeb Crawlers to proactively discover GeoWeb resources, and establish a GeoWeb search engine to provide querying and ranking mechanisms. However, to further improve resource discovery efficiency, we believe that understanding semantic meanings of GeoWeb resources as well as user interest is important to provide personalized search results. Therefore, in this study, we first design a GeoWeb resource ontology, which contains necessary concepts from many domain ontologies to represent a GeoWeb resource. This ontology helps map and discover semantic relationships between concepts. The GeoWeb resource ontology also helps semanticize a user’s search history to construct a user model representing important concepts to the user. Finally, when receiving a user query, the query is extended based on the GeoWeb ontology and the user model. In this case, semantic-similar and personalized search results can be found. By comparing with the semantic of GeoWeb resources, a proper ranking algorithm is designed to help users find targeted and related GeoWeb resources efficiently. In the result, two experiments of artificial users and one experiment of real users show that the proposed solution achieves 0.97, 0.97, and 0.85 Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) values. Overall, the experimental result shows that the proposed solution is able to discover and rank relevant resources according to users’ interest. | en_US |