Textual-Geospatial Integration Services for the National SMETE Digital Library

新兴的国家科学、数学、工程和技术教育数字图书馆（NSDL）包括许多项目集，它们的表示虽然在用户级别不同，但包含语义相关的信息。例如，考虑某些地区的土地使用地图与一本有关农业实践的书中对该地区的引用之间的联系。NSDL旨在为其用户提供服务，帮助他们在异构表示的项目中查找和集成语义相关的信息。该项目正在构建操作服务，使NSDL的用户能够轻松地从文本、地图和图像中集成访问信息——特别是在地理空间特征和区域方面与语义相关的信息。这些服务将帮助用户找到：——包含文本中隐含引用的特征或地点的地图或图像，以及——隐含引用地图和图像中包含的特征和地点的文本。更先进的服务将帮助用户评估从这些不同来源获得的地理空间信息之间的一致性。总的来说，这些服务将允许在地理空间上对大量文本进行索引和访问，即使它们的“编目记录”不包含明确的地理空间引用。为了实现这些服务，项目团队将位于圣巴巴拉的加州大学亚历山大数字图书馆（ADL; http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu）的地理空间搜索服务与伊利诺伊理工学院信息检索实验室（http://www.ir.iit.edu）开发的高性能信息检索（IR）服务集成在一起。这一整合的关键部分是为ADL开发的400多万项地名词典和相关服务。（地名词典提供了地点和特征的文本表示和地理空间“足迹”的基于坐标的表示之间的映射，从而允许在相关现象的文本和地图/图像表示之间在任何方向进行语义映射。）具体而言，项目团队正在将地名词典集成到红外引擎中，将红外引擎集成到地理空间数字图书馆中，并开发检查备选地理空间参考一致性的服务。这些服务将允许在分布式异构（文本和非文本）数字图书馆之间进行无缝的地理空间查询，并将允许对未进行地理编目的文本进行地理空间引用（即，目前可用的几乎所有文本）。

The emerging National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) includes many sets of items whose representations, while different at the user level, contain semantically related information. Consider, for example, the association between land-use maps of some region, and references to that region in a book concerning agricultural practices. The NSDL aims to support its users with services that help them find and integrate such semantically related information in such heterogeneously represented items.This project is constructing operational services to make it easy for users of the NSDL to have integrated access to information from texts, maps, and images--specifically, information that is semantically related in terms of geospatial features and regions. These services will help users find:-- maps or images containing features or places that are referred to implicitly within texts, and-- texts that implicitly reference features and places contained in maps and images.More advanced services will help users evaluate the consistency between geospatial information obtained from such varying sources. Collectively, these services will allow large collections of texts to be indexed and accessed geospatially, even if their "cataloging records" do not contain explicit geospatial references.To implement these services, the project team is integrating the geospatial search services of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL; http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu) at the University of California at Santa Barbara with the high-performance information retrieval (IR) services developed by the Illinois Institute of Technology's Information Retrieval Laboratory (http://www.ir.iit.edu). The key component in this integration is the 4+ million item gazetteer and associated services developed for ADL. (A gazetteer provides a mapping between textual representations of places and features, and coordinate-based representations of their geospatial "footprints," thus allowing a semantic mapping to be made in either direction between textual and map/image representations of related phenomena.) Specifically, the project team is integrating a gazetteer into an IR engine, integrating an IR engine into a geospatial digital library, and developing services that check the consistency of alternative geospatial references. These services will allow seamless geospatial queries across distributed heterogeneous (text and non-text) digital libraries and will enable geospatial referencing of texts that have not otherwise been geographically cataloged (i.e., almost all texts currently available).