Integrating Textual Ontology and Visual Features for Content Based Search in an Invertebrate Paleontology Knowledgebase

Abstract

The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology is a definitive work completed by more than 300 authors in the field of Paleontology, covering all categories of invertebrate animals. The digital version for the Treatise is consisted of multiple PDF files, however, these files are just a clone of paper version and are not well formatted, which makes it hard to extract structured data using only straightforward methods. In order to make fossil and extant records in the Treatise organized and searchable from a web interface, a digital library which is called Invertebrate Paleontology Knowledgebase (IPKB) was built for information sharing and querying in the Treatise. It is consisted of a database which stores records of all fossils and extant invertebrate animals, and a web interface which provides an online access. The existing IPKB system provides a general framework for the Treatise’s information showing and searching, however, it has very limited search functions, only allowing users querying by pure text. Details of structural properties in the fossil descriptions are not carefully taken into consideration. Moreover, sometimes users cannot provide correct and rich enough query terms. Although authors of the Treatise are all paleontologists, the expected users of IPKB may not be that professional. In order to overcome this limitation and bring more powerful search features into the IPKB system, in this thesis, we present a content-based search function, which allows users to search using textual ontology descriptions and images of fossils. First, this thesis describes the work done by previous research on IPKB system. Except for the original text and image processing approaches, we also present our new efforts on improving these original methods. Second, this thesis presents the algorithm and approach adopted in the construction of content-based search system for IPKB. The search functions in the old IPKB system did not consider the differences among morphological details of certain regions of fossils. Three major parts are discussed in detail: (1) Textual ontology based search. (2) Image based search. (3) Text-image based search.