Geocontext extraction methods analysis for determining the new approach to automatic semantic places recognition

Goal of this paper is to determine actual trends in geocontext extraction methods and to understand which types of geocontext information are the most interesting for users. For this purposes comparison of recent researches about geocontext analysis was done. Researches were compared by the type of achieved result, used formalism, source data and limitations. As the main result of comparison new approach for automatic semantic places recognition was proposed. This approach is based on geotags markup with semantic user-defined tags. The solution allows extracting information (coordinates and a set of corresponding semantic tags on the natural language) about locations which are interesting for the location-based services users. The main advantage of the approach is its simplicity - the method does not rely on any syntax analysis algorithms during the semantic labeling stage. For illustrating the approach an example of the general purpose accidents monitoring service for the Geo2Tag platform was described

Quality Assessment of the Canadian OpenStreetMap Road Networks

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been applied in many fields such as participatory planning, humanitarian relief and crisis management because of its cost-effectiveness. However, coverage and accuracy of VGI cannot be guaranteed. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a popular VGI platform that allows users to create or edit maps using GPS-enabled devices or aerial imageries. The issue of geospatial data quality in OSM has become a trending research topic because of the large size of the dataset and the multiple channels of data access. The objective of this study is to examine the overall reliability of the Canadian OSM data. A systematic review is first presented to provide details on the quality evaluation process of OSM. A case study of London, Ontario is followed as an experimental analysis of completeness, positional accuracy and attribute accuracy of the OSM street networks. Next, a national study of the Canadian OSM data assesses the overall semantic accuracy and lineage in addition to the quality measures mentioned above. Results of the quality evaluation are compared with associated OSM provenance metadata to examine potential correlations. The Canadian OSM road networks were found to have comparable accuracy with the tested commercial database (DMTI). Although statistical analysis suggests that there are no significant relations between OSM accuracy and its editing history, the study presents the complex processes behind OSM contributions possibly influenced by data import and remote mapping. The findings of this thesis can potentially guide cartographic product selection for interested parties and offer a better understanding of future quality improvement in OSM

Contextualized and personalized location-based services

Advances in the technologies of smart mobile devices and tiny sensors together with the increase in the number of web resources open up a plethora of new mobile information services where people can acquire and disseminate information at any place and any time. Location-based services (LBS) are characterized by providing users with useful and local information, i.e. information that belongs to a particular domain of interest to the user and can be of use while the user remains in a particular area. In addition, LBS need to take into account the interactions and dependencies between services, user and context for the information filtering and delivery in order to fulfill the needs and constraints of mobile users. We argue that consequently it brings up a series of technical challenges in terms of data semantics and infrastructure, context-awareness and personalization, as well as query formulation and answering etc. They can not be simply extended from existing traditional data management strategies. Instead, they need a new solution. Firstly, we propose a semantic LBS infrastructure on the basis of the modularized ontologies approach. We elaborate a core ontology which is mainly composed of three modules describing the services, users and contexts. The core ontology aims at presenting an abstract view (a model) of all information in LBS. In contrast, data describing the instances (of services user and actual contextual data) are stored in three independent data stores, called the service profiles, user profiles and context profiles. These data are semantically aligned with the concepts in the core ontology through a set of mappings. This approach enables the distributed data sources to be maintained in a autonomous manner, which is well adapted to the high dynamics and mobility of the data sources. Secondly, we separately address the function, features, and our modelling approach of the three major players, i.e. service, context and user in LBS. Then, we define a set of constructs to represent their interactions and inter-dependencies and illustrate how these semantic constructs can contribute to personalized and contextualized query processing. Service classes are organized in a taxonomy, which distinguishes the services by their business functions. This concept hierarchy helps to analyze and reformulate the users' queries. We introduce three new kinds of relationships in the service module to enhance the semantics of interactions and dependencies between services. We identify five key components of contexts in LBS and regard them as a semantic contextual basis for LBS. Component contexts are related together by specific composition relationships that can describe spatio-temporal constraints. A user profile contains personal information about a given user and possibly a set of self-defined rules, which offer hints on what the user likes or dislikes, and what could attract him or her. In the core ontology clustering users with common features can help the cooperative query answering. Each of the three modules of the core ontology is an ontology in itself. They are inter-related by relationships that link concepts belonging to two different modules. The LBS fully benefits from the modularized structure of the core ontology. It allows restricting the search space, as well as facilitating the maintenance of each module. Finally, we studied the query reformulation and processing issues in LBS. How to make the query interface tangible and provide rapid and relevant answers are typical concerns in all information services. Our query format not only fully obeys the "simple, tangible and effective" golden-rules of user-interface design, but also satisfies the needs of domain-independent interface and emphasizes the importance of spatio-temporal constraints in LBS. With pre-defined spatio-temporal operators, users can easily specify in their queries the spatio-temporal availability they need for the services they are looking for. This allows eliminating most of irrelevant answers that are usually generated by keyword-based approaches. Constraints in the various dimensions (what, when, where and what-else) can be expressed by a conjunctive query, and then be smoothly translated to RDF-patterns. We illustrate our query answering strategy by using the SPARQL syntax, and explain how the relaxation can be done with rules specified in the query relaxation profile