Semantic Enhancement of Environmental Metadata

Abstract

Spatial and environmental information infrastructures emerge around the world. Metadata are a fundamental part of these infrastructures. They allow the reuse of data collections for new research topics, independent of the original context. Therefore infrastructures and associated metadata standards ensure a sustainable data management. Furthermore there is a trend to open up former expert applications to the public. Public users do not know the vocabulary used by experts and therefore need support. This paper presents an ontology-based framework which supports search in open text fields of geo metadata.