The development and interlinkage of a drought vocabulary in the EuroGEOSS interoperable catalogue infrastructure

Metadata catalogues are used for facilitating the discovery of data and web services in, e.g., growing collections of Earth observation resources. Two conditions need to be met in order to successfully retrieve resources in catalogues: the metadata describing resources have to be complete and accurate and the keywords used in searches semantically related to the keywords contained in the metadata descriptions. One method to increase the rate of successfully retrieved metadata in catalogues is the use of controlled vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be used for annotating metadata with appropriate keywords and then also presented to users of the catalogue for specifying search terms. In the process of preparing metadata for drought-related data and services within the EuroGEOSS project, the need of a drought-specific vocabulary arose. This paper presents this drought vocabulary, the methodology followed for its development, its integration in the EuroGEOSS drought infrastructure and discusses its usefulness for the drought thematic area. The usefulness of the vocabulary is hereby measured by an increased use of search terms coming from an appropriate vocabulary and by an increase in the successful retrieval of resources. In particular, metadata must be annotated with appropriate keywords from a controlled vocabulary, thesaurus or ontology suitable for that particular field

Semantics-Aware Indexing of Geospatial Resources Based on Multilingual Thesauri: Methodology and Preliminary Results

the discovery functionality implemented by geoportals is primarily based on the syntactic matching of users’ search pattern against descriptive metadata, such as title, abstract, or keywords. As a consequence, the retrieval process is often hampered by linguistic issues related to multilingualism, semantic heterogeneity (synonymy, homonymy, etc.), and terminology mismatch in general. We propose a novel criterion for associating resources to language-neutral identifiers, thus enabling multilingual access to datasets and services as well as query expansion and refinement. The methodology has been successfully applied to the ISO-compliant metadata records aggregated by the INSPIRE Geoportal and is driving semantics-aware extensions of the discovery functionalities of the latter

ARIADNE: A Research Infrastructure for Archaeology

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives, and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades have become ever more collaborative, distributed, and data intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organization, analysis, and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access, and (re)use have lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access, and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realize. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users’ expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the e-infrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery, and access), and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarizes lessons learned and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in the sharing of data through ARIADNE

Enabling European archaeological research: The ARIADNE E-infrastructure

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of einfrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use has lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EUfunded network has developed an einfrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users' expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the einfrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarises lessons learned, and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through ARIADNE

Knowledge-Based Named Entity Recognition of Archaeological Concepts in Dutch

The advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows the process of deriving information from large volumes of text to be automated, making text-based resources more discoverable and useful. The attention is turned to one of the most important, but traditionally difficult to access resources in archaeology; the largely unpublished reports generated by commercial or “rescue” archaeology, commonly known as “grey literature”. The paper presents the development and evaluation of a Named Entity Recognition system of Dutch archaeological grey literature targeted at extracting mentions of artefacts, archaeological features, materials, places and time entities. The role of domain vocabulary is discussed for the development of a KOS-driven NLP pipeline which is evaluated against a Gold Standard, human-annotated corpus

The Development and Interlinkage of a Drought Vocabulary in the EuroGEOSS Interoperable Catalogue Infrastructure

Metadata catalogues are used for facilitating the discovery of data and web services in, e.g., growing collections of Earth observation resources. Two conditions need to be met in order to successfully retrieve resources in catalogues: the metadata describing resources have to be complete and accurate and the keywords used in searches semantically related to the keywords contained in the metadata descriptions. One method to increase the rate of successfully retrieved metadata in catalogues is the use of controlled vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be used for annotating metadata with appropriate keywords and then also presented to users of the catalogue for specifying search terms. In the process of preparing metadata for drought-related data and services within the EuroGEOSS project, the need of a drought-specific vocabulary arose. This paper presents this drought vocabulary, the methodology followed for its development, its integration in the EuroGEOSS drought infrastructure and discusses its usefulness for the drought thematic area. The usefulness of the vocabulary is hereby measured by an increased use of search terms coming from an appropriate vocabulary and by an increase in the successful retrieval of resources. In particular, metadata must be annotated with appropriate keywords from a controlled vocabulary, thesaurus or ontology suitable for that particular field

Enabling European Archaeological Research: The ARIADNE E-Infrastructure

In the last 20 years, e-infrastructures have become ever more important for the conduct and progress of research in all branches of scientific enterprise. Increasingly collaborative, distributed and data-intensive research requires the sharing of resources (data, tools, computing facilities) via e-infrastructure as well as support for effective co-operation among research groups (ESF 2011; ESFRI 2016). Moreover there is the expectation that with large datasets ('big data'), e-infrastructure and advanced computing techniques, new scientific questions can be tackled. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of various digital methods and tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. The provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use for the heritage sector is, however, lagging behind other research fields, such as the natural and life sciences. The consequence is a high level of fragmentation of archaeological data and limited capability for collaborative research across institutional and national as well as disciplinary boundaries (Aspöck and Geser 2014). This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This e-infrastructure initiative is being promoted by a consortium of archaeological institutes, data archives and technology developers, and funded under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (ARIADNE 2014a; Niccolucci and Richards 2013). ARIADNE enables archaeological data providers, large and small, to register and connect their resources (datasets, collections) to the e-infrastructure, and a data portal provides search, access and other services across the integrated resources. The portal puts into operation a proof of concept exemplar first developed under the ARENA (Archaeological Records of Europe Networked Access) project (Kenny and Richards 2005; Kilbride 2004), itself inspired by a proposal made by Hansen (1993). ARIADNE integrates resource discovery metadata using various controlled vocabularies, e.g. the W3C Data Catalogue Vocabulary (adapted for describing archaeological datasets), subject thesauri, gazetteers, chronologies, and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). Based on this integration the data portal offers several ways to search and access resources made available by data providers located in different countries. ARIADNE thus acts as a broker between data providers and users and offers additional web services for products such as high-resolution images, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), 3D objects and landscapes. Employing such services in research projects or for content deposited in digital archives will greatly enhance the ability of researchers to publish, access and study archaeological content online. ARIADNE therefore represents a substantial advance for archaeology; in particular it provides a common platform where dispersed data resources can be uniformly described, discovered and accessed. It is also an essential step towards the even more ambitious goal of offering archaeologists integrated data, tools and computing resources for web-based research that creates new knowledge (e-archaeology). The next section describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE user surveys undertaken to match expectations and requirements for the e-infrastructure and data portal services are then presented. The main part of the article describes ARIADNE's overall architecture, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and other extant or experimental services. A further section presents the on-going evaluation of the data integration and set of services. Finally, the article summarises some lessons already learned in the integration of data resources and services, and considers the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through the ARIADNE e-infrastructure and portal

Creating a Multilingual Geospatial Thesaurus: GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas Translations for Italian, Spanish, French and Slovenian

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are a set of terms of interest for the development of global spatial data infrastructures. These SBAs form a two level hierarchy (categories and subcategories) ranging from natural disasters to human health. The SBAs are used widely by international geographic information sharing initiatives and policy makers. One of the uses of the SBAs is to allow users to search a spatial data infrastructure for resources that relate to the theme of interest (category or subcategory) selected. However, the SBAs are currently only specified in English. In this paper, we provide a translation of the SBAs into Italian, Spanish, French, and Slovenian in order to support multilingual search, and we underline the issues involved in the translation. Since some of these issues seem to be strictly related to a few discrepancies present in the original version of the SBAs, this paper also proposes a revision of the original set of terms in English

Ontology matching: state of the art and future challenges

shvaiko2013aInternational audienceAfter years of research on ontology matching, it is reasonable to consider several questions: is the field of ontology matching still making progress? Is this progress significant enough to pursue some further research? If so, what are the particularly promising directions? To answer these questions, we review the state of the art of ontology matching and analyze the results of recent ontology matching evaluations. These results show a measurable improvement in the field, the speed of which is albeit slowing down. We conjecture that significant improvements can be obtained only by addressing important challenges for ontology matching. We present such challenges with insights on how to approach them, thereby aiming to direct research into the most promising tracks and to facilitate the progress of the field

Semantic Search and Discovery for Earth Observation Products using Ontology Services

Η πρόσβαση σε δεδομένα που έχουν προέλθει από την παρατήρηση της Γης παραμένει δύσκολη για τους περισσότερους απλούς χρήστες μέχρι και σήμερα. Οι υπάρχουσες μηχανές αναζήτησης απευθύνονται σε ειδικούς του πεδίου παρατήρησης της Γης, αδυνατώντας να καλύψουν τις ανάγκες επιστημονικών κοινοτήτων από άλλα πεδία, καθώς και απλών χρηστών που δεν είναι εξοικειωμένοι με τα δεδομένα παρατήρησης της Γης. Στα πλαίσια αυτής της διπλωματικής αναπτύχθηκαν σημασιολογικές τεχνολογίες οι οποίες ενσωματώθηκαν σε μια πλατφόρμα αναζήτησης ΕΟ-netCDF δεδομένων. Οι τεχνολογίες αυτές με τη χρήση οντολογιών επιτρέπουν την εύκολη αναζήτηση και πρόσβαση σε δεδομένα που έχουν προέλθει από την παρατήρηση της Γης.Access to Earth Observation products remains difficult for end-users in most domains. Although various search engines have been developed, these are targeted for advanced Earth Observation users, and fail to support scientific communities from other domains, as well as casual users not familiar with the concepts of Earth Observation.In the context of this thesis, we developed semantic technologies that were used to semantically enhance a search engine for EO-netCDF product. We present how these technologies utilize ontology services to substantially improve the ability of end-users to explore, understand and exploit the vast amount of Earth Observation data that is available nowadays