Methodologies for Augmented Discovery of Geospatial Resources

Presently, solutions for geo-information sharing are mainly based on Web technologies, implementing service-oriented frameworks, and applying open (international or community) standards and interoperability arrangements. Such frameworks take the name of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). The recent evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW), with the introduction of the Semantic Web and the Web 2.0 concepts and solutions, made available new applications, architectures, and technologies for sharing and linking resources published on the Web. Such new technologies can be conveniently applied to enhance capabilities of present SDIs--in particular, discovery functionality. Different strategies can be adopted in order to enable new ways of searching geospatial resources, leveraging the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies. The authors propose a Discovery Augmentation Methodology which is essentially driven by the idea of enriching the searchable information that is associated with geospatial resources. They describe and discuss three different high-level approaches for discovery augmentation: Provider-based, User-based, and Third-party based. From the analysis of these approaches, the authors suggest that, due to their flexibility and extensibility, the user-based and the third-party based approaches result more appropriate for heterogeneous and changing environments such as the SDI one. For the user-based approach, they describe a conceptual architecture and the main components centered on the integration of user-generated content in SDIs. For the third-party approach, the authors describe an architecture enabling semantics-based searches in SDIs.