A Method for Identifying Geospatial Data Sharing Websites by Combining Multi-Source Semantic Information and Machine Learning
Authors: Cheng Quanying , Zhu Yunqiang , Zeng Hongyun , Song Jia , Wang Shu , Zhang Jinqu , Qian Lang , Qi Yanmin 
Published: September 2021

Geospatial data sharing is an inevitable requirement for scientific and technological innovation and economic and social development decisions in the era of big data. With the development of modern information technology, especially Web 2.0, a large number of geospatial data sharing websites (GDSW) have been developed on the Internet. GDSW is a point of access to geospatial data, which is able to provide a geospatial data inventory. How to precisely identify these data websites is the foundation and prerequisite of sharing and utilizing web geospatial data and is also the main challenge of data sharing at this stage. GDSW identification can be regarded as a binary website classification problem, which can be solved by the current popular machine learning method. However, the websites obtained from the Internet contain a large number of blogs, companies, institutions, etc. If GDSW is directly used as the sample data of machine learning, it will greatly affect the classification precision. For this reason, this paper proposes a method to precisely identify GDSW by combining multi-source semantic information and machine learning. Firstly, based on the keyword set, we used the Baidu search engine to find the websites that may be related to geospatial data in the open web environment. Then, we used the multi-source semantic information of geospatial data content, morphology, sources, and shared websites to filter out a large number of websites that contained geospatial keywords but were not related to geospatial data in the search results through the calculation of comprehensive similarity. Finally, the filtered geospatial data websites were used as the sample data of machine learning, and the GDSWs were identified and evaluated. In this paper, training sets are extracted from the original search data and the data filtered by multi-source semantics, the two datasets are trained by machine learning classification algorithms (KNN, LR, RF, and SVM), and the same test datasets are predicted. The results show that: (1) compared with the four classification algorithms, the classification precision of RF and SVM on the original data is higher than that of the other two algorithms. (2) Taking the data filtered by multi-source semantic information as the sample data for machine learning, the precision of all classification algorithms has been greatly improved. The SVM algorithm has the highest precision among the four classification algorithms. (3) In order to verify the robustness of this method, different initial sample data mentioned above are selected for classification using the same method. The results show that, among the four classification algorithms, the classification precision of SVM is still the highest, which shows that the proposed method is robust and scalable. Therefore, taking the data filtered by multi-source semantic information as the sample data to train through machine learning can effectively improve the classification precision of GDSW, and comparing the four classification algorithms, SVM has the best classification effect. In addition, this method has good robustness, which is of great significance to promote and facilitate the sharing and utilization of open geospatial data.