The report summarises the findings of leveraging synonyms to improve data resource discovery and retrieval, focusing on improving semantic interoperability across domains.

Semantic interoperability refers to the ability to exchange data between parties while ensuring the data is correctly understood.

Online sources like product catalogues, online shops and large websites offer search mechanisms for website visitors to find the products or information of their interest.

The way a visitor searches and, more concretely, the terms he uses to retrieve content influence the returned results. The returned hits can be poor if the terminology used by the visitor does match that of the web source

The INSPIRE Geoportal, the central component of the INSPIRE infrastructure regulated under the Directive 2007/2/EC, is the web entry to the European SDIs and many geospatial data related to the environment.

Although the content looks well organised, it remains difficult for users not familiar with these classifications to find the wished information. 

Adding synonyms as alternative labels to the objects can help solve this problem. Although the original scope of this study only mentions synonyms, other relations between words, especially the hypernym-hyponym relationships, are also relevant.

• Synonyms: Two words that can be interchanged in a context are said to be synonymous relative to that concept.
• Hypernym: a word that is more generic than a given word.
• Hyponym: a word that is more specific than a given word.

This study is relevant for data managers (especially vocabulary managers), and users of online resources can also easier link their data to existing resources.

It provides a methodology that answers three main questions:

1.  Where can synonyms be found?
2.  How can they be harvested efficiently?
3.  How can the harvested information be applied?

The methodology has been tested in three different use cases related to agriculture, water, and noise. These case studies were selected because they represent thematic domains that go beyond the boundaries of the INSPIRE themes classification.

Check out the outcomes of this activity:

•  Synonyms for INSPIRE spatial objects, including obtained datasets and data visualisations with results
• Synonym finder tool, providing a convenient way to collect synonyms and related terms from a given list of words

Download the report here.

How to cite this document: Olijslagers, M. and Vandenbroucke, D., Using synonyms to better data discoverability, Hernandez Quiros, L. editor(s), Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022, ISBN 978-92-76-48660-2, doi:10.2760/08796, JRC128528.