Toward semantics-aware annotation and retrieval of spatial data

The retrieval of spatial resources is typically hindered by the lack of exhaustive metadata, linguistic issues, multilingualism, and domain-related terminology mismatches. This paper describes an experimental attempt to set up a knowledge base that will serve as groundwork for harmonising domain knowledge from distinct thematic areas, to enable the semantics-aware annotation of resources, and to support the implementation of novel discovery techniques. Setting this up also required establishing a general work flow for translating ISO-compliant registries into SKOS/RDF data structures and enriching them with structural information. These steps are also presented. The validity of the approach is then evaluated by analysing various applications' exploitation of the knowledge base in diverse use cases.