Spatio-Terminological Information Retrieval using the BUSTER System Ubbo Visser, Thomas Vögele and Christoph Schlieder 1 Abstract This paper deals with a practical solution for finding and integrating information from the Web. Since some of the ideas of our BUSTER system are already known we focus on two issues: we introduce the Comprehensive Source Description (CSD), a necessary de- scription for information sources that allows extra services such as integration or transla- tion and a new feature that allows a combined search for concepts at a certain location, introducing the concept@location query. We provide an example for better understand- ing and discuss the results. 1. Introduction Over the last decade, several approaches with regard to intelligent information inte- gration have been proposed (e.g. Ontobroker, PICSEL, BUSTER (Wache et al. 2001)). Some of these systems use ontologies for the integration of heterogeneous data sources. Lately, this approach has been widely accepted (Grüninger/Uschold 2002). The Bremen University Semantic Translator for Enhanced Retrieval (BUSTER) is a middleware for semantic data integration which uses ontologies for data integration. A prototypical system was developed at the Center for Computing Technologies at the University of Bremen. This system consists of two parts: BUSTER/Q, a tool for intelligent information retrieval, and BUSTER/SI, a tool for the semantic integra- tion of heterogeneous data sources. Both tools can be integrated into an infrastruc- ture of distributed geoservices such as the GDI NRW (Kuhn et al. 2000). The focus of this paper will be BUSTER/Q, the information retrieval service. BUSTER/Q offers a tool to manage and select geodata sources and geoservices suitable for specific tasks and purposes. To fulfil this task, BUSTER/Q has to have access to detailed descriptions of the data sources and services. Such detailed meta- data are made available in the form of Comprehensive Source Descriptions (CSD). The CSD of an individual data source or service is stored at the site of the data source or service, and formalized in XML/RDF format. Through an automatic re- 1 University of Bremen, Center for Computing Technologies, Universitätsallee 21-23, D- 28359 Bremen, Germany, {visser,vogele,cs}@tzi.de EnviroInfo 2002 (Wien) Environmental Communication in the Information Society - Proceedings of the 16th Conference Copyright © IGU/ISEP, Wien 2002. ISBN: 3-9500036-7-3