A semantic geo-catalogue for a local administration

The enhancement of the search capabilities of geo-spatial tools occupies one of the highest positions in the agenda of the INSPIRE initiative. This can be done by equipping applications with tools able to understand user terminology. However, this is in contrast with current approaches, which tend to fix in advance the terminology with a consequent rigidity in the way users interact with the system. In this paper we present the work we have done with the Semantic Geo-Catalogue (SGC) project in providing a semantic extension to the geo-catalogue of the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT) in Italy. This was done through the adoption of a semantic matching tool and a faceted ontology that codifies knowledge about the geography of the PAT and that was created by reorganizing data extracted from the local geographical dataset. Thanks to the semantic extension, queries to the geo-catalogue are expanded with domain specific terms taken from the ontology thus obtaining a higher number of relevant documents in output. We also complied with the Open Government Data (OGD) initiative by publishing in RDF and by linking to relevant dictionaries some useful data taken from the local repository.