An Ontology-Based Semantic Search Approach for Geosciences

Linguistic and semantic heterogeneities in geosciences are two main impediments in geo-information retrieving with popular search engines or autonomous data catalog from indexing services. In this paper, we proposed a semantic search approach for geosciences, which is applied to the Geoonto website. The search engine is implemented by a smart query agent mapping linguistically between lexicons and ontologies derived from geosciences thesauri, representing geological concepts with semantic relationships, and providing an inference service to retrieve the hierarchy from the geo-ontologies. Geoonto search tool uses these services to refine the users' search request to ensure the accuracy and completeness of query results.