Enabling Semantic Search and Knowledge Discovery for ArcGIS Online: A Linked-Data-Driven Approach

ArcGIS Online is a unified Web portal designed by Environment System Research Institute (ESRI). It contains a rich collection of Web maps, layers, and services contributed by GIS users throughout the world. The metadata about these GIS resources reside in data silos that can be accessed via a Web API. While this is sufficient for simple syntax-based searches, it does not support more advanced queries, e.g., finding maps based on the semantics of the search terms, or performing customized queries that are not pre-designed in the API. In metadata, titles and descriptions are commonly available attributes which provide important information about the content of the GIS resources. However, such data cannot be easily used since they are in the form of unstructured natural language. To address these difficulties, we combine data-driven techniques with theory-driven approaches to enable semantic search and knowledge discovery for ArcGIS Online. We develop an ontology for ArcGIS Online dat...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AGILE
• Authors: Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Sathya Prasad, Song Gao
• Keywords: AGILE 2015, GIS