Identifying geospatial inconsistency of web services metadata using spatial ranking

Geospatial metadata is one of the key elements of the geographic resource catalogues on the Web. Catalogues such as GeoNetwork use the direct and indirect spatial references from metadata to process spatial queries. The visibility of resources in a collection often depends on the consistency of the descriptions that help to find resources. Spatially inconsistent metadata records can hide resources and make them irretrievable. This paper presents a semi-automatic approach based on the combination of spatial ranking, reverse geocoding, geographic knowledge organization systems, and information retrieval techniques able to detect geospatial inconsistencies in metadata collections. Experimental results with a dataset of Geospatial Web Service metadata records show that this approach provides a significant advantage in terms of inconsistency detection, and rich insight into the metadata. People responsible of geospatial catalogues, such as librarians and Spatial Data Infrastructure managers, could take advantage of the approach presented in this work to assess the visibility of their assets.