Idea to improve keyword / thesaurus handling

GeoNetwork GeoNetwork User
1

I’ve been surprised to find that GeoNetwork matches keywords to their thesaurus entry using the skos:prefLabel rather than the identifier by which I mean the rdf:about of the rdf:Description of rdf:type skos:Concept

This has given me problems when my users want to change the way a concept is visually presented (its skos:prefLabel) - I have to ‘rewire’ the whole GeoNetwork catalogue to the “new keyword”.

Perhaps it’s not implemented this way because thesauri from different places (INSPIRE, GEMET, …) seem to structure their SKOS differently, and the GeoNetwork developers are trying to be flexible.

2

I couldn’t put these links in the post (Error: “only allowed a maximum of two links” - but these are two!)

I think this approach has led to problems like [GeoNetwork-users] Geonetwork, thesaurus, alternative labels

Something similar was asked for back in 2008: [GeoNetwork-users] Question about the thesaurus use. - #5 by Francois-Xavier_Prun

3

I would add this to the developer list at [GeoNetwork-devel] Thesaurus management improvements desired - but I’m not a developer (was last century!)

4

I moved your discussion to the GeoNetwork User category where I think it’s more appropriate than our general category.

1 Like
5

You are welcome to join the discussion there; perhaps you can help pull together interest + funding for a feature improvement.

6

Happy to do that - now to see if anyone else does show an interest!
I’ll try to tag the two developers who have related posts in that forum; I know both Francois & Byron.

7

Hi! I think this is interesting.

I’m not very familiar with the way GeoNetwork finds matching keywords in a thesaurus but I guess we could look for an identifier first and then use the prefLabel field as a fallback, thus not breaking anything.

Another thing that could be a low hanging fruit is to index alternative labels alongside the preferred one, so that (to use an example given in one of the links) both searching for “cat” and “felis catius” would yeild the exact same results.

What do you think of those ideas?

8

I don’t have a case for (or experience of) altLabels - there are people on the linked posts who do.

One thing I would say thought is that it is a (strong) SKOS recommendation that the prefLabel is unique (within a language & concept scheme). There is no such recommendation on altLabels (or hidden labels).

9

I’m not sure if I’m understanding the problem, but in the metadata editor you can choose the encoding of the keyword, by default is text, but you can change it to Anchor (in Geonetwork 4.4 I think Anchor is the default)

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 12.45.28
Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 12.45.28809×206 13.1 KB

If you select Anchor, uses the rdf:about to encode the keyword:

<gmd:keyword>
  <gmx:Anchor xlink:href="http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet/nl/inspire-theme/ad">Adressen</gmx:Anchor>
</gmd:keyword>