A Semantic Search Engine for Spatial Web Portals

Spatial Web Portals, such as NASA's Earth Science Gateway (ESG, esg.gsfc.nasa.gov) and ESIP's Earth Information Exchange (EIE, eie.esipfed.org) have improved the sharing, exchanging, and interoperating of Earth science information. Large amount of geospatial metadata, data, and web services have been collected for SWPs to serve different user communities. However, most search engines in SWPs are based on keyword matching, which does not 'Understand' the meaning of user's queries and is not friendly to end users, especially when a user has limited Earth science knowledge. Therefore, it is a challenge to find needed data from a variety of geospatial resources in an intelligent manner. This paper introduces the efforts on integrating semantic search engine to make the search intelligent.