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Geospatial data catalogs enable users to discover and access geographical information. Prevailing solutions are document oriented and fragment the spatial continuum of the geospatial data into independent and disconnected resources described through metadata. Due to this, the complete answer for a query may be scattered across multiple resources, making its discovery and access more difficult. This paper proposes an improved information retrieval process for geospatial data catalogs that aggregates the search results by identifying the implicit spatial/thematic relations between the metadata records of the resources. These aggregations are constructed in such a way that they match better the user query than each resource individually. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consistency is an essential aspect of the quality of metadata. Inconsistent metadata records are harmful: given a themed query, the set of retrieved metadata records would contain descriptions of unrelated or irrelevant resources, and may even not contain some resources considered obvious. This is even worse when the description of the location is inconsistent. Inconsistent spatial descriptions may yield invisible or hidden geographical resources that cannot be retrieved by means of spatially themed queries. Therefore, ensuring spatial consistency should be a primary goal when reusing, sharing and developing georeferenced digital collections. We present a methodology able to detect geospatial inconsistencies in metadata collections based on the combination of spatial ranking, reverse geocoding, geographic knowledge organization systems and information-retrieval techniques. This methodology has been applied to a collection of metadata records describing maps and atlases belonging to the Library of Congress. The proposed approach was able to automatically identify inconsistent metadata records (870 out of 10,575) and propose fixes to most of them (91.5%) These results support the ability of the proposed methodology to assess the impact of spatial inconsistency in the retrievability and visibility of metadata records and improve their spatial consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of cultural heritage for supporting the knowledge economy has promoted its digitisation and online publication. Many cultural heritage repositories have published millions of digitised items using semantic web technologies and Linked Data approaches. These repositories frequently use knowledge organisation systems to classify the resources, but the domain heterogeneity makes it difficult to know if they are the most suitable ones. This paper describes the process used to discover and profile the knowledge organisation systems used in the cultural heritage domain. Additionally, for those knowledge organisation systems with a thesaurus-like structure, a detailed quality analysis is performed. The results of this analysis can be used as a key factor for the selection of knowledge organisation systems in classification tasks. • Discovery and study of KOS in cultural heritage LD collections is difficult. • The use of cultural KOS is concentrated: 17% of the KOS aggregate 80% of the uses. • KOS definitions are important for reusability but not usually provided. • KOS consistency quality is less relevant than completeness and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Metadata are a key element for the development of information infrastructures because they facilitate the semantic description of contents and services. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of metadata standards have become a barrier for the generation of these metadata. Many metadata editors are not useful anymore because they do not support the latest version of metadata standards or the new profiles arisen in the market. Thus, this work proposes a model driven approach for the development of metadata editors, more focused on the generic treatment of metadata models than on the development of specific edition forms for a reduced set of metadata standards. This approach has been tested in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures for the development of an Open Source tool called CatMDEdit. Additionally, the approach could be also applied to improve the efficiency of any metadata editor using a metamodeling development strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]