A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

Interoperability and machine-to-machine translation model with mappings to machine learning tasks

Modern large-scale automation systems integrate thousands to hundreds of thousands of physical sensors and actuators. Demands for more flexible reconfiguration of production systems and optimization across different information models, standards and legacy systems challenge current system interoperability concepts. Automatic semantic translation across information models and standards is an increasingly important problem that needs to be addressed to fulfill these demands in a cost-efficient manner under constraints of human capacity and resources in relation to timing requirements and system complexity. Here we define a translator-based operational interoperability model for interacting cyber-physical systems in mathematical terms, which includes system identification and ontology-based translation as special cases. We present alternative mathematical definitions of the translator learning task and mappings to similar machine learning tasks and solutions based on recent developments in machine learning. Possibilities to learn translators between artefacts without a common physical context, for example in simulations of digital twins and across layers of the automation pyramid are briefly discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 1 listing. Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics 2019, INDIN'1