LAUSR

ABSTRACT Advances in linked geospatial data, recommender systems, and geographic information retrieval have led to urgent necessity to assess the overall semantic relatedness between keyword sets of geographic metadata. In this study, a new model is proposed for computing the semantic relatedness between arbitrary two keyword sets of geographic metadata stored in current global spatial data infrastructures. In this model, the overall semantic relatedness is derived by pairing these keywords that are found to be most relevant to each other and averaging their relatedness. To find the most relevant keywords across two keyword sets precisely, the keywords in the keyword set of geographic metadata are divided into three kinds: the thesaurus elements, the WordNet elements, and the statistical elements. The thesaurus-lexical relatedness measure (TLRM), the extended thesaurus-lexical relatedness measure (ETLRM), and the Longest Common Substring method are proposed to compute the semantic relatedness between two thesaurus elements, two WordNet elements, a thesaurus element, and a WordNet element and two statistical elements, respectively. A human data set – the geographic-metadata’s keyword set relatedness dataset, which was used to evaluate the precision of the semantic relatedness measures of keyword sets of geographic metadata, was created. The proposed method was evaluated against the human-generated relatedness judgments and was compared with the Jaccard method and Vector Space Model. The results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a high correlation with human judgments and outperformed the existing methods. Finally, the proposed method was applied to quantitatively linked geospatial data.