Development of an Ontology-Based Framework to Enhance Geospatial Data Discovery and Selection in Geoportals for Natural-Hazard Early Warning Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discovering and selecting relevant geospatial datasets from heterogeneous sources remains difficult in conventional geoportals, where keyword-based search often fails to capture thematic relationships or user intent. This article presents an ontology-based framework that augments geoportals with semantic-aware discovery and selection. The contributions are as follows: (1) the geospatial metadata ontology (GMO), which reuses W3C and OGC ontologies and aligns with ISO 19115 to provide a uniform metadata representation enriched with thematic hierarchies and relations; and (2) GeoFit, a discovery framework that integrates GMO into geoportal workflows. The framework extends conventional functionality by enabling semantic query expansion, faceted exploration of thematic hierarchies, and ranking of datasets according to conceptual proximity and fitness-for-use criteria. These capabilities demonstrate how ontology integration operationalizes domain knowledge in the discovery process and makes dataset selection more interpretable and targeted. Validation demonstrated feasibility in the context of natural hazard Early Warning Systems (EWSs), where the prototype surfaced datasets relevant to different components, organized them into ranked and navigable results, and illustrated portability of the method to applied settings. The study confirms that embedding an ontology layer into geoportals provides semantic capabilities absent from keyword-only interfaces and establishes a foundation for extending discovery functions in heterogeneous geospatial infrastructures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".