Controlled Vocabularies Boost International Participation and Normalization of Searches

摘要

The Global Change Master Directory's (GCMD) science staff set out to document Earth science data and provide a mechanism for it's discovery in fulfillment of a commitment to NASA's Earth Science progam and to the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites' (CEOS) International Directory Network (IDN.) At the time, whether to offer a controlled vocabulary search or a free-text search was resolved with a decision to support both. The feedback from the user community indicated that being asked to independently determine the appropriate 'English" words through a free-text search would be very difficult. The preference was to be 'prompted' for relevant keywords through the use of a hierarchy of well-designed science keywords. The controlled keywords serve to 'normalize' the search through knowledgeable input by metadata providers. Earth science keyword taxonomies were developed, rules for additions, deletions, and modifications were created. Secondary sets of controlled vocabularies for related descriptors such as projects, data centers, instruments, platforms, related data set link types, and locations, along with free-text searches assist users in further refining their search results. Through this robust 'search and refine' capability in the GCMD users are directed to the data and services they seek. The next step in guiding users more directly to the resources they desire is to build a 'reasoning' capability for search through the use of ontologies. Incorporating twelve sets of Earth science keyword taxonomies has boosted the GCMD S ability to help users define and more directly retrieve data of choice.