Textual Ontology and Visual Features Based Search for a Paleontology Digital Library

The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology is the most reliable information source of invertebrate paleontology research. Based on this Treatise, an Invertebrate Paleontology Knowledgebase (IPKB) has been built as a digital library to provide these data through a web interface. However, the search functions provided by the old IPKB system are only based on textual information, while some more important information, such as textual ontology and fossil images, are not considered at all. In order to overcome this limitation, and provide more reliable and flexible search options, we develop a new hybrid search function for the current IPKB system. In particular, we propose an approach to extract textual ontology information for each genus, as well as build a fossil image dataset where each image is tagged with its genus name. Based on the data from both sources, a hybrid search system is developed by integrating both textual and visual features, and thus, more search options are available to users and the searching results are significantly improved.