Naijun Zhou has been awarded a grant of $63,191 from NSF for "Developing a Visual Semantic Query System to Enhance the Search Capability of Geospatial Data Portals."

This grant will support the development of a novel web-based visual semantic query system and a bottom-up semantic integration method to enhance the geospatial data search capability of the multi-agency Federal web-based geospatial data portal, Geospatial One Stop (GOS). The efficiency and accuracy of data search will be increased with a searchable global view of semantically heterogeneous geospatial attributes. The results can be employed to other geospatial data portals and applications that need a solution to semantic integration.

This project is interdisciplinary, involving GI Science, information science, and domain knowledge and will add visual semantic query functionality to geospatial portals and provide bottom-up semantic integration using local semantics without the need of an upper ontology or standardized terminology.

Broadly, this research will contribute to geospatial data integration that is an essential (but missing) component of the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure. With GOS as a collaborator, a variety of users from both the public and academic community can benefit from the project results, e.g., emergency response and management activities that need a large amount of geospatial data.