A case-based reasoning approach for task-driven spatial–temporally aware geospatial data discovery through geoportals

There is a critical need to develop a means for fast, task-driven discovery of geospatial data found in geoportals. Existing geoportals, however, only provide metadata-based means for discovery, with little support for task-driven discovery, especially when considering spatial–temporal awareness. To address this gap, this paper presents a Case-Based Reasoning-supported Geospatial Data Discovery (CBR-GDD) method and implementation that accesses geospatial data by tasks. The advantages of the CBR-GDD approach is that it builds an analogue reasoning process that provides an internal mechanism bridging tasks and geospatial data with spatial–temporal awareness, thus providing solutions based on past tasks. The CBR-GDD approach includes a set of algorithms that were successfully implemented via three components as an extension of geoportals: ontology-enhanced knowledge base, similarity assessment model, and case retrieval nets. A set of experiments and case studies validate the CBR-GDD approach and application, and demonstrate its efficiency.