GeoLinked Data. An application case / Un caso de aplicación

In this paper we present the process that has been followed for the development of an application that makes use of several heterogeneous Spanish public datasets that are related to three themes of INSPIRE Directive, specifically Administrative Units, Hydrography, and Statistical Units. Our application aims at analysing existing relations between the Spanish coastal area and different statistical variables such as population, unemployment, dwelling, industry, and building trade. Besides providing ethodological guidelines for the generation, publishing and exploitation of Linked Data from such datasets, we provide an important innovation with respect to other similar processes followed in other initiatives by dealing with the geometrical information of features

LAND USE DATASET COLLECTION AND PUBLICATION BASED ON LUCAS AND HILUCS

Abstract Spatial data have become very important phenomena within the last decade in Europe due to a strong support from the political spectrum with regard to related legislation and resulting in financial support to several research, educational, and enlargement projects. INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive indeed defines the principles for the harmonization of spatial data infrastructure in the European community, including Land Use and Land Cover data themes. INSPIRE defines a methodology on how to transform datasets to common data models, but it does not cover the process of data collection and update, because it is out of its scope. Evaluation of the Land Use dataset derived from remote sensing products complemented by fieldworks has been realized since 2006 by Eurostat within the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) project. The work presented in this paper follows the LUCAS fieldwork methodology, which was applied during the fieldwork in July 2014 in the City of Zagreb (Croatia), to use at the local (municipal) geoportal level. The surveying groups collected point features with the following data type attributes: Land Use codes defined by HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System) and optional Land Cover codes defined by LUCAS classification. In addition, photographs representing the observed areas were collected by cameras embedded in the mobile GIS platforms. An update of original topological layer was performed and Web GIS components for sharing the newly developed datasets were implemented. The results presented provide a suitable proposal for fieldworks methodology and updates of a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at a local spatial data infrastructure level

From Here to Eternity: An Experiment Applying the e-Framework Infrastructure for Education and Research and the SUMO Ontology to Standards-based Geospatial Web Services

A number of efforts have been made in recent years to define standards for the description of resources (including web services) in services oriented architectures. These standards often use description logic ontologies (for example, OWL-S) and are intended to be machine-readable. They have been applied to geospatial web services to describe the functions that those services perform in a way that can be automatically interpreted by systems. By contrast, little effort has gone into the development of human readable descriptions of resources in a services oriented architecture, other than using unstructured natural language. e-Framework is an infrastructure for the higher education environment that provides a typology of human-readable artefacts that can be used to describe resources, and provides an internal structure for those artefacts. e-Framework has thus far not been used with geospatial information even though geospatial information has a number of important roles in education and research, and has a well-organised community of users and creators. This paper applies the e-Framework infrastructure to OGC web services, and also recommends the refinement of e-Framework with the use of the SUMO Upper Level Ontology to define Service Genres, the most abstract level of artefacts in e-Framework. It then illustrates the ways in which the Open Geospatial Consortium standards and specifications may be described in e-Framework. The work evaluates SUMO for e-Framework purposes, finding that its use for Service Genres is possible and offers a number of gains. It also evaluates e-Framework from a geospatial perspective, and shows that e-Framework’s constraints on resource descriptions do not suit the large and complex nature of geospatial web services

Using Open Geographic Data to Generate Natural Language Descriptions for Hydrological Sensor Networks

Providing descriptions of isolated sensors and sensor networks in natural language, understandable by the general public, is useful to help users find relevant sensors and analyze sensor data. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of using geographic knowledge from public databases available on the Web (such as OpenStreetMap, Geonames, or DBpedia) to automatically construct such descriptions. We present a general method that uses such information to generate sensor descriptions in natural language. The results of the evaluation of our method in a hydrologic national sensor network showed that this approach is feasible and capable of generating adequate sensor descriptions with a lower development effort compared to other approaches. In the paper we also analyze certain problems that we found in public databases (e.g., heterogeneity, non-standard use of labels, or rigid search methods) and their impact in the generation of sensor descriptions

Why Geospatial Linked Open Data for Smart Mobility?

While the concept of Smart Cities is gaining momentum around the world and government data are increasingly available and accessible on the World Wide Web, key issues remain about Open Data and data standards for smart cities. A better integration and interoperabilty of data through the World Wide Web is only possible when everyone agrees on the standards for data representation and sharing. Linked Open Data positions itself as a solution for such standardization, being a method of publishing structured data using standard Web technologies. This facilitates the interlinking between datasets, makes them readable by computers, and easily accesible on the World Wide Web. We illustrate this through the example of an evolution from a traditional Content Management System with a geoportal, to a semantic based aproach. The Traffic Safety Monitor was developed in the period of 2012-2015 to monitor the road safety and to support policy development on road safety in Flanders (the northern part of Belgium). The system is built as a Content Management System (CMS), with publication tools to present geospatial indicators on road safety (e.g. the number of accidents with cars and the number of positive alcohol tests) as Web maps using stardardized Open Geospatial Consortium Webservices. The Traffic Safety Monitor is currently further developed towards a Mobility Monitor. Here, the focus is on the development of a business process model for the semantic exchange and publication of spatial data using Linked Open Data principles targeting indicators of sustainable and smart mobility. In the future, the usability of cycling Infrastructure for vehicles such as mobility scooters, bicycle trailers etc. can be assessed using Linked Open Data. The data and metadata is published in Linked open data format, opening the door for their reuse by a wide range of (smart) applications

Transforming meteorological data into linked data

This paper describes the process followed in order to make some of the public meterological data from the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET, Spanish Meteorological Office) available as Linked Data. The method followed has been already used to publish geographical, statistical, and leisure data. The data selected for publication are generated every ten minutes by the 250 automatic stations that belong to AEMET and that are deployed across Spain. These data are available as spreadsheets in the AEMET data catalog, and contain more than twenty types of measurements per station. Spreadsheets are retrieved from the website, processed with Python scripts, transformed to RDF according to an ontology network about meteorology that reuses the W3C SSN Ontology, published in a triple store and visualized in maps with Map4rdf

Transforming Meteorological Data into Linked Data

We describe the AEMET meteorological dataset, which makes available some data sources from the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET, Spanish Meteorological Office) as Linked Data. The data selected for publication are generated every ten minutes by approximately 250 automatic weather stations deployed across Spain and made available as CSV files in the AEMET FTP server. These files are retrieved from the server, processed with Python scripts, transformed to RDF according to an ontology network (which reuses the W3C SSN Ontology), published in a triple store and visualized using Map4RDF.This work has been supported by the Spanish project myBigData (TIN2010-17060)

Visions d’État : deux systèmes d'informations géographiques dans la « gouvernance »

L'administration fédérale canadienne et la Commission européenne ont construit, dans le courant des années 2000, deux réseaux de Systèmes d'informations géographiques (SIG) : le Système national d'information forestière au Canada, et l'Infrastructure d'information géographique dans la Communauté européenne. Ces SIG permettent le traitement géographique de données sociales et environnementales ainsi que leur représentation sur des cartes. Nous appréhendons ces deux réseaux de SIG sous l'angle de leur valeur heuristique : leur analyse nous permet d'étudier les configurations institutionnelles dans lesquelles ils ont été développés, c'est-à-dire, dans ces cas précis, ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler la « gouvernance ». Les SIG sont des instruments de mesure et de représentation de certains phénomènes : ils appartiennent à la classe des instruments d'objectivation. En tant qu'instruments d'objectivation, ils nous permettent de discuter deux éléments théoriques de la « gouvernance » : le rapport entre les administrations centrales et les administrations locales ; le rapport entre les administrations étatiques et les organisations non-étatiques. A travers cette discussion, nous montrons d'une part que la réarticulation de paliers de gouvernement différents ne signifie pas, comme cela a pu être écrit, un retrait de l'administration centrale au profit des administrations locales, mais au contraire une manière de contrôler plus étroitement celles-ci. Nous montrons d'autre part que cette renégociation des rapports entre les administrations centrales et locales ne s'accompagne pas, en pratique, d’une renégociation des rapports entre administrations étatiques et organisations non-étatiques. En révélant que les données non-étatiques ne sont pas intégrées dans les réseaux de SIG étatiques, nous relativisons les théories qui voient dans la « gouvernance » un mode de gouvernement ouvert aux organisations non-étatiques. Cela nous conduit à approfondir la piste qui envisage les instruments étatiques d'objectivation comme des moyens d'écarter de l'objectivation des phénomènes sociaux ou naturels les éléments qui contredisent l'action gouvernementale. Cette exégèse politique de deux ensembles de programmes informatiques particuliers – les SIG – nous amène, en conclusion, à proposer de considérer certains programmes informatiques comme des institutions politiques.During the 1990s, Canada’s federal government and the European Commission established two networks of geographic information systems (GIS): the National Forest Information System in Canada and the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Union. These two systems permit social and environment facts to be studied geographically and to be mapped. In this thesis, we emphasize the heuristic value of these two networks of geographic information systems: an analysis of them allows us to better understand the institutional configurations that existed during their development, that is to say, in our cases, what is called “governance”. As instruments that measure and represent phenomena, GIS belong to knowledge tools. As knowledge tools, they allow us to discuss two issues of “governance” theories: relationships between central and local administrations, and relationships between state and non-state organizations. This discussion leads us to show, on the one hand, that the reorganization of different levels of government does not signify, as is described elsewhere in the literature, the retreat of central administrations in favor of local administrations, but is rather a means for more forcefully controlling them. On the other hand, we show that the renegotiation of relationships between central and local administrations is not accompanied, in reality, by a negotiation of relationships with non-state organizations. In light of the fact that non-state organizations are not integrated in states’ GIS networks, we must revisit theories of “governance” that foresee governments as more open to civil society. This helps us to understand how knowledge tools can be used in order to exclude certain facts from State's sight. In conclusion, this political analysis of two specific software – GIS – leads us to propose that some software can be considered as political institutions

Linked data approach in accessing geospatial big data

Today, linked data is frequently associated with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as its technology stack is utilized in alleviating geospatial data integration issue. Geospatial data have become ubiquitous as they have emerged everywhere and these data can be geo-referenced. One of the types of georeferenced data that is lacking in Malaysia is the insufficient availability of Malaysian oceanographic data. It is a great relief to know that most of the earth observation agencies have granted access into their data obtained from satellite altimetry. Consequently, the exponential growth of geospatial data as well as its complexity and diversity has led to big data problem and caused information sharing and exchange on the web becoming more complicated. To resolve this issue, linked data should be used in handling geospatial big data. Linked data is one of the best practices for exposing, sharing, publishing and connecting the structured data on the web. This study explored linked data as an approach to provide access to the Malaysian physical oceanography datasets on the web, which would allow the data to be standardized in a machine-readable format. The research reviewed the existing software tools used in publishing linked data, identified an appropriate software tool to generate Resource Description Framework (RDF) presenting geographical data and built a physical oceanography data website based on linked data principles. Initially, document analysis was conducted to review the existing linked data tools that have been used for geospatial data. Various scholarly articles, journals, tutorials and web pages were used as references to investigate the use of linked data tools. Based on the review, five software tools, namely Geometry2RDF, TripleGeo, Datalift, OpenLink Virtuoso and KARMA were identified as the appropriate tools to generate the RDF. Each of this software tool has its own capabilities and functionalities. Next, the tools were compared with one another based on literature review to get the best possible tool that can manage georeferenced oceanographic data. After the comparison, this study identified the best software tool to transform the shapefile into the RDF format was Datalift. Finally, a web-based information system was built to publish the linked data to data interlinking and sharing by web users. In conclusion, this study has introduced an alternative way to publish and access geospatial data, particularly related to physical oceanography datasets using linked data principles. Using such an approach would facilitate stakeholders and unveil information within the big data, thus enriching the discovery of geospatial information on the web

Search improvement within the geospatial web in the context of spatial data infrastructures

El trabajo desarrollado en esta tesis doctoral demuestra que es posible mejorar la búsqueda en el contexto de las Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales mediante la aplicación de técnicas y buenas prácticas de otras comunidades científicas, especialmente de las comunidades de la Web y de la Web Semántica (por ejemplo, Linked Data). El uso de las descripciones semánticas y las aproximaciones basadas en el contenido publicado por la comunidad geoespacial pueden ayudar en la búsqueda de información sobre los fenómenos geográficos, y en la búsqueda de recursos geoespaciales en general. El trabajo comienza con un análisis de una aproximación para mejorar la búsqueda de las entidades geoespaciales desde la perspectiva de geocodificación tradicional. La arquitectura de geocodificación compuesta propuesta en este trabajo asegura una mejora de los resultados de geocodificación gracias a la utilización de diferentes proveedores de información geográfica. En este enfoque, el uso de patrones estructurales de diseño y ontologías en esta aproximación permite una arquitectura avanzada en términos de extensibilidad, flexibilidad y adaptabilidad. Además, una arquitectura basada en la selección de servicio de geocodificación permite el desarrollo de una metodología de la georreferenciación de diversos tipos de información geográfica (por ejemplo, direcciones o puntos de interés). A continuación, se presentan dos aplicaciones representativas que requieren una caracterización semántica adicional de los recursos geoespaciales. El enfoque propuesto en este trabajo utiliza contenidos basados en heurísticas para el muestreo de un conjunto de recursos geopesaciales. La primera parte se dedica a la idea de la abstracción de un fenómeno geográfico de su definición espacial. La investigación muestra que las buenas prácticas de la Web Semántica se puede reutilizar en el ámbito de una Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales para describir los servicios geoespaciales estandarizados por Open Geospatial Consortium por medio de geoidentificadores (es decir, por medio de las entidades de una ontología geográfica). La segunda parte de este capítulo desglosa la aquitectura y componentes de un servicio de geoprocesamiento para la identificación automática de ortoimágenes ofrecidas a través de un servicio estándar de publicación de mapas (es decir, los servicios que siguen la especificación OGC Web Map Service). Como resultado de este trabajo se ha propuesto un método para la identificación de los mapas ofrecidos por un Web Map Service que son ortoimágenes. A continuación, el trabajo se dedica al análisis de cuestiones relacionadas con la creación de los metadatos de recursos de la Web en el contexto del dominio geográfico. Este trabajo propone una arquitectura para la generación automática de conocimiento geográfico de los recursos Web. Ha sido necesario desarrollar un método para la estimación de la cobertura geográfica de las páginas Web. Las heurísticas propuestas están basadas en el contenido publicado por os proveedores de información geográfica. El prototipo desarrollado es capaz de generar metadatos. El modelo generado contiene el conjunto mínimo recomendado de elementos requeridos por un catálogo que sigue especificación OGC Catalogue Service for the Web, el estandar recomendado por deiferentes Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales (por ejemplo, the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)). Además, este estudio determina algunas características de la Web Geoespacial actual. En primer lugar, ofrece algunas características del mercado de los proveedores de los recursos Web de la información geográfica. Este estudio revela algunas prácticas de la comunidad geoespacial en la producción de metadatos de las páginas Web, en particular, la falta de metadatos geográficos. Todo lo anterior es la base del estudio de la cuestión del apoyo a los usuarios no expertos en la búsqueda de recursos de la Web Geoespacial. El motor de búsqueda dedicado a la Web Geoespacial propuesto en este trabajo es capaz de usar como base un motor de búsqueda existente. Por otro lado, da soporte a la búsqueda exploratoria de los recursos geoespaciales descubiertos en la Web. El experimento sobre la precisión y la recuperación ha demostrado que el prototipo desarrollado en este trabajo es al menos tan bueno como el motor de búsqueda remoto. Un estudio dedicado a la utilidad del sistema indica que incluso los no expertos pueden realizar una tarea de búsqueda con resultados satisfactorios