Ontology based data warehousing for mining of heterogeneous and multidimensional data sources

Heterogeneous and multidimensional big-data sources are virtually prevalent in all business environments. System and data analysts are unable to fast-track and access big-data sources. A robust and versatile data warehousing system is developed, integrating domain ontologies from multidimensional data sources. For example, petroleum digital ecosystems and digital oil field solutions, derived from big-data petroleum (information) systems, are in increasing demand in multibillion dollar resource businesses worldwide. This work is recognized by Industrial Electronic Society of IEEE and appeared in more than 50 international conference proceedings and journals

Making Distant Futures: Implementing Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in the UK and Finland

This thesis explores the making of distant futures through two nuclear waste disposal projects. Geological disposal of nuclear waste (GD) has enjoyed a technopolitical consensus for decades as the best available method for the long-term management of hazardous radioactive material, yet, to date, no geological repository facilities exist anywhere in the world. These ‘disposal facilities’ are expected to seclude nuclear waste from the environment for up to one million years, raising challenges for technical knowledge production, policy implementation and public expectations. Examining the proposed implementation of GD in the UK and Finland, this thesis focuses on the ways in which the management of nuclear waste is crafted in the present day and projected on, million of years into the future, as necessitated by the waste half- lives and as demanded by regulatory practice. In exploring these two national contexts, the thesis traces how knowledge is made about distant futures that exist beyond contemporary knowledge making capacity. As a contribution to limited ethnographic discussion on nuclear waste matters, the making of distant nuclear futures is examined in spaces that have been overlooked in sociological literatures on GD e.g. materials science laboratories. The thesis draws from actor-network approaches, sociology of time and feminist STS literature to develop a ‘comparative-conversationalist’ framework. This approach enabled the comparison of wildly different cases by bringing them into conversation rather than direct comparison with each other. Based on participant-observations in two university research labs; interviews with civil servants, university researchers, technical consultants, regulators and industry representatives; and documentary analysis, I trace practices through which the future is made safe, and, nuclear wastes crafted as manageable. The thesis will demonstrate how future making around nuclear waste varies over time and space. I propose that, because of the very distant future that GD concerns, we should discuss the safety aspects of GD and the ability of disposal facilities to contain wastes as ‘real unrealised present possibilities’. Towards this, I develop the notion of contain-ability. Contain-ability directs attention towards the relational makings of safety in the present, and the uncertainty of containment in the very distant future. It underlines safety as an emergent feature rather than an inherent property of disposal concepts and facilities achieved by engineers. 3 Overall then, the thesis demonstrates that a distant nuclear future is a crafted through situated makings that depend on available sociotechnical conditions, including: geological environments; the scale and complexity of nuclear industries and waste inventories; available financial resources and cultural reserves; and imaginations of wastes, nuclear futures and pasts. The successes and failures of policies for the implementation of GD cannot be construed simply through public acceptance or opposition arguments and more attention needs to be directed to the contingencies of scientific knowledge production and future making

Geographic Information Systems for Real-Time Environmental Sensing at Multiple Scales

The purpose of this investigation was to design, implement, and apply a real-time geographic information system for data intensive water resource research and management. The research presented is part of an ongoing, interdisciplinary research program supporting the development of the Intelligent River® observation instrument. The objectives of this research were to 1) design and describe software architecture for a streaming environmental sensing information system, 2) implement and evaluate the proposed information system, and 3) apply the information system for monitoring, analysis, and visualization of an urban stormwater improvement project located in the City of Aiken, South Carolina, USA. This research contributes to the fields of software architecture and urban ecohydrology. The first contribution is a formal architectural description of a streaming environmental sensing information system. This research demonstrates the operation of the information system and provides a reference point for future software implementations. Contributions to urban ecohydrology are in three areas. First, a characterization of soil properties for the study region of the City of Aiken, SC is provided. The analysis includes an evaluation of spatial structure for soil hydrologic properties. Findings indicate no detectable structure at the scales explored during the study. The second contribution to ecohydrology comes from a long-term, continuous monitoring program for bioinfiltration basin structures located in the study area. Results include an analysis of soil moisture dynamics based on data collected at multiple depths with high spatial and temporal resolution. A novel metric is introduced to evaluate the long-term performance of bioinfiltration basin structures based on soil moisture observation data. Findings indicate a decrease in basin performance over time for the monitored sites. The third contribution to the field of ecohydrology is the development and application of a spatially and temporally explicit rainfall infiltration and excess model. The model enables the simulation and visualization of bioinfiltration basin hydrologic response at within-catchment scales. The model is validated against observed soil moisture data. Results include visualizations and stormwater volume calculations based on measured versus predicted bioinfiltration basin performance over time

Geographic Information Systems and Science

Geographic information science (GISc) has established itself as a collaborative information-processing scheme that is increasing in popularity. Yet, this interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary system is still somewhat misunderstood. This book talks about some of the GISc domains encompassing students, researchers, and common users. Chapters focus on important aspects of GISc, keeping in mind the processing capability of GIS along with the mathematics and formulae involved in getting each solution. The book has one introductory and eight main chapters divided into five sections. The first section is more general and focuses on what GISc is and its relation to GIS and Geography, the second is about location analytics and modeling, the third on remote sensing data analysis, the fourth on big data and augmented reality, and, finally, the fifth looks over volunteered geographic information.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Developing a human-environment timeline: a chronology of ideas and events for the anthropocene

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of GeographyJohn A. Harrington, Jr.Clearly, the character of the relationship between humans and their environment has changed over time. Scholars have developed a geologic timeline and a timeline for life, but there is not a human-environment timeline. The proposed new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is inadequate for encapsulating the diversity of the human-environment relationship throughout history and prehistory. This dissertation initiates conversation about developing an official human-environment timeline. Oriented from the perspective of a geographer, this exploratory research involved the qualitative analysis of human-environment events and ideas from a series of four geographic encyclopedias. A human-environment timeline emerged from this research, as well as a hierarchical typology of time periods: durations, duration revolutions, scenes, scene transitions, and intervals. The timeline was then interpreted according to four “ways of knowing”: normal science, cultural ecology, political ecology, and humanistic geography. This research supports inquiry into how time periods can be employed to better understand and communicate the human-environment relationship through time

Book of short Abstracts of the 11th International Symposium on Digital Earth

The Booklet is a collection of accepted short abstracts of the ISDE11 Symposium

Ontology of Geological Mapping

In this thesis, an ontology for the geological mapping domain is constructed using the Protégé ontology editor. The Geological Mapping ontology is developed using terms and relationships, and their properties, as they relate to creating a geologic map. This vocabulary is semantically modeled in the ontology using Web Ontology Language (OWL). The purpose of this thesis is to exemplify how an ontology can be designed and developed to represent geological knowledge as it relates to mapping

Semantic location extraction from crowdsourced data

Crowdsourced Data (CSD) has recently received increased attention in many application areas including disaster management. Convenience of production and use, data currency and abundancy are some of the key reasons for attracting this high interest. Conversely, quality issues like incompleteness, credibility and relevancy prevent the direct use of such data in important applications like disaster management. Moreover, location information availability of CSD is problematic as it remains very low in many crowd sourced platforms such as Twitter. Also, this recorded location is mostly related to the mobile device or user location and often does not represent the event location. In CSD, event location is discussed descriptively in the comments in addition to the recorded location (which is generated by means of mobile device's GPS or mobile communication network). This study attempts to semantically extract the CSD location information with the help of an ontological Gazetteer and other available resources. 2011 Queensland flood tweets and Ushahidi Crowd Map data were semantically analysed to extract the location information with the support of Queensland Gazetteer which is converted to an ontological gazetteer and a global gazetteer. Some preliminary results show that the use of ontologies and semantics can improve the accuracy of place name identification of CSD and the process of location information extraction