Mapping Search Queries to Metadata Fields in a GeoBlacklight Repository

Abstract

The relation between user search behaviors and metadata is one that can illuminate ways in which the retrieval of resources may be facilitated or enhanced. The purpose of this article was to determine how well the search terms individuals use to find datasets in a geospatial repository aligns with the terms used in metadata to describe those resources. Through query log analysis, we broke down queries into specific categories and mapped those to specific fields in the GeoBlacklight schema to see how often terms matched to particular fields. The fields that had the most frequent matches to queries were dc.title and dc.description. We explain the methods by which we collected and used the data and discuss the implications of our findings for ongoing curation work for geospatial metadata.