A Community Metadata Augmentation and Curation Model for Improved Cross-Domain Geoscience Data Discovery

CINERGI (Community Inventory of EarthCube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability, http://earthcube.org/group/cinergi) is an NSF EarthCube Building Block project assembling a large cross-disciplinary inventory of geoscience information resources. Metadata descriptions are obtained from multiple geoscience catalogs and through community contributions. The metadata documents are converted to a standard representation, analyzed and automatically enhanced, which includes automatic generation of relevant keywords based on text analysis, derivation of spatial extent, and validation of organization names mentioned in the metadata. The keyword generation is based on a cross-domain bridge ontology, which integrates several existing geoscience ontologies and controlled vocabularies, and on GeoSciGraph, a system for text parsing, vocabulary management, and semantic annotation. Once processed, the metadata records are republished as ISO-19115/19139 documents with embedded semantic references to the ontologies. The metadata are made available for search via a data discovery gateway that integrates faceted search over SOLR-indexed documents with ESRI Geoportal. In addition, the interface provides access to provenance information and an ability for collection managers to curate automatically augmented metadata.