A Semantic Search Engine for Spatial Web Portals

Spatial Web Portals have dramatically improved the sharing, exchanging and interoperating of Earth Science data, information and services. Currently, huge amount of geospatial data, metadata, and web services have been collected, cataloged, and made available through SWPs to serve a broad user community. However, most search engines in SWPs are based on keyword matching, which can not effectively ´understand´ the meaning of users´ queries, especially when a user has limited Earth science knowledge. So how to find needed data from a variety of geospatial resources becomes a big challenge. In this paper, we´ll discuss a way of building semantic search engine to make the spatial-aware search more intelligent.