Geospatial Information Retrieval Base on Query Expansion and Semantic Indexing

Abstract

Accepted: 24.11.2015 In this paper, a hybrid approach is developed for geospatial information retrieval which combines query expansion (QE) and latent semantic indexing (LSI) methods. The hybrid method uses the advantages of Query Expansion and Semantic indexing methods for improving search results. LSI establishes relations depending on the similarities between queries and the documents where QE helps by adding extra similar terms to the queries. The dataset is populated using data extracted from Wikipedia and USGS (The United States Geological Survey). Automation is programmed to get all the information from the web and to extract the meaningful words. The significant terms are the name of the places, directions, and nearby locations. The dataset includes mountains and places with their latitudes, longitudes, locations and directions. The extracted data is also taken into Protege for semantically querying. The approach is applied to geographical data (popular search items on search engines), and by querying the data with the combination of LSI and QE more related results are handled than the results of methods when they are applied alone. Many queries are run, and the results are listed and compared. At the end of the study it is understood that the hybrid method considerably improves the search results.