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The Semantic Web is an attempt to add meaningful annotations to Web resources, services and content that requires developing reference ontologies, which help to understand these annotations. The venue of the Web of Data makes the geographic information, which has become an important part of the current Web, widely usable. This paper demonstrates how the Geospatial Web might take advantage from the Semantic Web. The show case is a services catalog dedicated to support the visualization applications based on on-the-fly data integration. The presented infrastructure for improving the catalog functionality applies an administrative geography, i.e. an ontology of political organization of the territory, published as Linked Data. The principal advantage of this approach is reflected by enhancing the functionality of the user application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OpenGIS Catalogue Services (CS) specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information and related resources in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. The CS specification also defines a HTTP protocol binding, which is called ˵Catalogue Services for the Web″ or CSW. A fair description of CSW is a remote catalogue interface over the HTTP protocol, but not over the architecture of the mainstream Web where search engines are the users΄ gateway to information. This paper identifies some aspects of CSW that difficult the findability of metadata in the Web, and hence, the discovery of resources. This paper also presents a toolkit that exposes as Linked Data the content of metadata repositories offered through CSW with the purpose of improving the discovery of metadata records in search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the vertiginous volume information growing, the amount of answers provided by traditional search engines and satisfying syntactically the user queries has enlarged directly. In order to reduce this problem the race to develop Semantic Search Engines (SSE) is increasingly popular. Currently, there are multiple proposals for Semantic Search Engines, and they are using a wide range of methods for matching the semantics behind user queries and the indexed collection of resources. In this work we survey the semantic search engines domain, and present a miscellaneous of perspectives about the different classification of approaches. We have created a comparative scheme and identified the prevalent research directions in SSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic metadata quality is one of the most important aspects on the performance of Geographic Digital Libraries. After reviewing previous attempts outside the geographic domain, this paper presents early results from a series of experiments for the development of a quantitative method for quality assessment. The methodology is developed through two phases. Firstly, a list of geographic quality criteria is compiled from several experts of the area. Secondly, a statistical analysis (by developing a Principal Component Analysis) of a selection of geographic metadata record sets is performed in order to discover the features which correlate with good geographic metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]