Linking crowdsourced observations with INSPIRE

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.The combination of spatial data from the variety of sources on the web, being either legislative, commercially or voluntarily driven, is a major requirement for the establishment of a fully integrated geospatial web. Therefore, spatial data fusion techniques need to be linked to current web-developments, in particular on Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Semantic Web, to allow for standardized and effective use of combined spatial data for information retrieval. In this paper, crowdsourced environmental observations, representing the rapidly increasing amount of voluntarily collected data on the web, and INSPIRE, acting as the legal framework for spatial environmental information in Europe, are chosen to design and develop capabilities for spatial data fusion on the web. Possible use cases show mutual benefits for both volunteers and INSPIRE data providers, and might thus facilitate further collaboration. A prototypical implementation based on common SDI and Linked Data standards demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach and offers a starting point for further exploration

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

EzWeb/FAST: Reporting on a Successful Mashup-based Solution for Developing and Deploying Composite Applications in the Upcoming Web of Services

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) based on Web Services have attracted a great interest and IT investments during the last years, principally in the context of business-to-business integration within corporate intranets. However, they are nowadays evolving to break through enterprise boundaries, in a revolutionary attempt to make the approach pervasive, leading to what we call a user-centric SOA, i.e. a SOA conceived as a Web of Services made up of compositional resources that empowers end-users to ubiquitously exploit these resources by collaboratively remixing them. In this paper we explore the architectural basis, technologies, frameworks and tools considered necessary to face this novel vision of SOA. We also present the rationale behind EzWeb/FAST: an undergoing EU funded project whose first outcomes could serve as a preliminary proof of concep

Service-oriented design of environmental information systems

Service-orientation has an increasing impact upon the design process and the architecture of environmental information systems. This thesis specifies the SERVUS design methodology for geospatial applications based upon standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. SERVUS guides the system architect to rephrase use case requirements as a network of semantically-annotated requested resources and to iteratively match them with offered resources that mirror the capabilities of existing services

An Enhanced Architecture for LARIISA: An Intelligent System for Decision Making and Service Provision for e-Health using the cloud

International audienceHealth care services can be scarce and expensive in some countries and especially in isolated regions. The lack of information can degrade health care services, for example, by ineffective resource allocation or failure in epidemiological prediction. This paper proposes an architecture for system of decision making and service provisioning in the health care context. It encompasses and integrates data produced by environmental sensors installed in the assisted homes, medical data sets, domain-specific and semantic enriched data sets, and all data generated and collected in applications installed on mobile phones, wearable devices, desktops, web servers, and smart television. LARIISA architecture is presented as a platform to manage, provide and launch services that monitor and analyze data to supply relevant information to decision makers and health care actors that participate in the health care supply chain

LinkED: A Novel Methodology for Publishing Linked Enterprise Data

Semantic Web technologies have redefined and strengthened the Enterprise-Web interoperability over the last decade. Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to a set of best practices that empower enterprises to publish and interlink their data using existing ontologies on the World Wide Web. Current research in LOD focuses on expert search, the creation of unified information space and augmentation of core data from an enterprise context. However, existing approaches for publication of enterprise data as LOD are domain-specific, ad-hoc and suffer from lack of uniform representation across domains. The paper proposes a novel methodology called LinkED that contributes towards LOD literature in two ways: (a) streamlines the publishing process through five stages of cleaning, triplification, interlinking, storage and visualization; (b) addresses the latest challenges in LOD publication, namely: inadequate links, inconsistencies in the quality of the dataset and replicability of the LOD publication process. Further, the methodology is demonstrated via the publication of digital repository data as LOD in a university setting, which is evaluated based on two semantic standards: Five-Star model and data quality metrics. Overall, the paper provides a generic LOD publication process that is applicable across various domains such as healthcare, e-governance, banking, and tourism, to name a few

Ontology based software engineering - software engineering 2.0

This paper describes the use of ontologies in different aspects of software engineering. This use of ontologies varies from support for software developers at multiple sites to the use of an ontology to provide semantics in different categories ofsoftware, particularly on the web. The world's first and only software engineering ontology and a project management ontology in conjunction with a domain ontology are used to provide support for software development that is taking place at multiple sites. Ontologies are used to provide semantics to deal with heterogeneity in the representation of multiple information sources, enable the selection and composition of web services and grid resources, provide the shared knowledge base for multiagent systems, provide semantics and structure for trust and reputation systems and privacy based systems and codification of shared knawledge within different domains in business, science, manufacturing, engineering and utilities. They, therefore, bring a new paradigm to software engineering through the use of semantics as a central mechanism which will revolutionize the way software is developed and consumed in the future leading to the development of software as a service bringing about the dawn of software engineering 2.0