Improved Info Discovery with Recommender Systems

Congratulations to Bernhard Vockner from the Research Studio iSPACE, who today defended his PhD thesis "Enhancing Discovery in Geoportals: Geo-Enrichment, Semantic Enhancement and Recommendation Strategies for Geo-Information Discovery" with distinction!

Mr Vockner successfully presented his innovative work on adding recommender features to geoportals to his PhD committee at Z_GIS. Prof Bartelme (TU Graz) and Prof Car (GUTech Muscat) as discussants confronted the candidate with numerous questions and comments, leading a high level discussion about recent and future developments leading towards 'smarter' and more context aware geoportals.

Key publications within this dissertation are openly available:

• Geo-Enrichment and Semantic Enhancement of Metadata Sets to Augment Discovery in Geoportals by Bernhard Vockner and Manfred Mittlböck ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2014, 3(1), 345-367; doi:10.3390/ijgi3010345
• Recommender-based enhancement of discovery in Geoportals by Bernhard Vockner, Mariana Belgiu, Manfred Mittlboeck. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research. Vol 7 (2012)
• From Geoportals to Geographic Knowledge Portals by Bernhard Vockner, Andreas Richter and Manfred Mittlböck ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2013, 2(2), 256-275; doi:10.3390/ijgi2020256

geoplatform.at as a demonstrator prototype with
enhanced information discovery options