GI Systems for public health with an ontology based approach

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Health is an indispensable attribute of human life. In modern age, utilizing technologies for health is one of the emergent concepts in several applied fields. Computer science, (geographic) information systems are some of the interdisciplinary fields which motivates this thesis. Inspiring idea of the study is originated from a rhetorical disease DbHd: Database Hugging Disorder, defined by Hans Rosling at World Bank Open Data speech in May 2010. The cure of this disease can be offered as linked open data, which contains ontologies for health science, diseases, genes, drugs, GEO species etc. LOD-Linked Open Data provides the systematic application of information by publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. In the context of this study we aimed to reduce boundaries between semantic web and geo web. For this reason a use case data is studied from Valencia CSISP- Research Center of Public Health in which the mortality rates for particular diseases are represented spatio-temporally. Use case data is divided into three conceptual domains (health, spatial, statistical), enhanced with semantic relations and descriptions by following Linked Data Principles. Finally in order to convey complex health-related information, we offer an infrastructure integrating geo web and semantic web. Based on the established outcome, user access methods are introduced and future researches/studies are outlined

Knowledge hypergraph based-approach for multi-source data integration and querying : Application for Earth Observation domain

Early warning against natural disasters to save lives and decrease damages has drawn increasing interest to develop systems that observe, monitor, and assess the changes in the environment. Over the last years, numerous environmental monitoring systems and Earth Observation (EO) programs were implemented. Nevertheless, these systems generate a large amount of EO data while using different vocabularies and different conceptual schemas. Accordingly, data resides in many siloed systems and are mainly untapped for integrated operations, insights, and decision making situations. To overcome the insufficient exploitation of EO data, a data integration system is crucial to break down data silos and create a common information space where data will be semantically linked. Within this context, we propose a semantic data integration and querying approach, which aims to semantically integrate EO data and provide an enhanced query processing in terms of accuracy, completeness, and semantic richness of response. . To do so, we defined three main objectives. The first objective is to capture the knowledge of the environmental monitoring domain. To do so, we propose MEMOn, a domain ontology that provides a common vocabulary of the environmental monitoring domain in order to support the semantic interoperability of heterogeneous EO data. While creating MEMOn, we adopted a development methodology, including three fundamental principles. First, we used a modularization approach. The idea is to create separate modules, one for each context of the environment domain in order to ensure the clarity of the global ontology’s structure and guarantee the reusability of each module separately. Second, we used the upper-level ontology Basic Formal Ontology and the mid-level ontologies, the Common Core ontologies, to facilitate the integration of the ontological modules in order to build the global one. Third, we reused existing domain ontologies such as ENVO and SSN, to avoid creating the ontology from scratch, and this can improve its quality since the reused components have already been evaluated. MEMOn is then evaluated using real use case studies, according to the Sahara and Sahel Observatory experts’ requirements. The second objective of this work is to break down the data silos and provide a common environmental information space. Accordingly, we propose a knowledge hypergraphbased data integration approach to provide experts and software agents with a virtual integrated and linked view of data. This approach generates RML mappings between the developed ontology and metadata and then creates a knowledge hypergraph that semantically links these mappings to identify more complex relationships across data sources. One of the strengths of the proposed approach is it goes beyond the process of combining data retrieved from multiple and independent sources and allows the virtual data integration in a highly semantic and expressive way, using hypergraphs. The third objective of this thesis concerns the enhancement of query processing in terms of accuracy, completeness, and semantic richness of response in order to adapt the returned results and make them more relevant and richer in terms of relationships. Accordingly, we propose a knowledge-hypergraph based query processing that improves the selection of sources contributing to the final result of an input query. Indeed, the proposed approach moves beyond the discovery of simple one-to-one equivalence matches and relies on the identification of more complex relationships across data sources by referring to the knowledge hypergraph. This enhancement significantly showcases the increasing of answer completeness and semantic richness. The proposed approach was implemented in an open-source tool and has proved its effectiveness through a real use case in the environmental monitoring domain

A security-and quality-aware system architecture for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized, at the system level, by high diversity with respect to enabling technologies and supported services. IoT also assumes to deal with a huge amount of heterogeneous data generated by devices, transmitted by the underpinning infrastructure and processed to support value-added services. In order to provide users with valuable output, the IoT architecture should guarantee the suitability and trustworthiness of the processed data. This is a major requirement of such systems in order to guarantee robustness and reliability at the service level. In this paper, we introduce a novel IoT architecture able to support security, privacy and data quality guarantees, thereby effectively boosting the diffusion of IoT services

Building a context rich interface to low level sensor data

Sensor networks play an important role in our modern information society. These networks are used for a variety of activities in different domains, including traffic monitoring, environmental analysis, transport and personal health. In general, systems generate data in their own format with little or no associated semantics. As a result, data must be managed individually and significant human effort is required to analyze data and develop ad-hoc applications for different end-user requirements. The research presented here proposes a holistic and comprehensive approach to significantly reduce the human effort in analyzing networks of sensors. The goal is to facilitate any form of sensor network, enabling users to combine related semantics with sensor data, and facilitate the end-user transformation of data necessary to provide more complex query expressions, and thus meet the analytical requirements

Building Blocks for IoT Analytics Internet-of-Things Analytics

Internet-of-Things (IoT) Analytics are an integral element of most IoT applications, as it provides the means to extract knowledge, drive actuation services and optimize decision making. IoT analytics will be a major contributor to IoT business value in the coming years, as it will enable organizations to process and fully leverage large amounts of IoT data, which are nowadays largely underutilized. The Building Blocks of IoT Analytics is devoted to the presentation the main technology building blocks that comprise advanced IoT analytics systems. It introduces IoT analytics as a special case of BigData analytics and accordingly presents leading edge technologies that can be deployed in order to successfully confront the main challenges of IoT analytics applications. Special emphasis is paid in the presentation of technologies for IoT streaming and semantic interoperability across diverse IoT streams. Furthermore, the role of cloud computing and BigData technologies in IoT analytics are presented, along with practical tools for implementing, deploying and operating non-trivial IoT applications. Along with the main building blocks of IoT analytics systems and applications, the book presents a series of practical applications, which illustrate the use of these technologies in the scope of pragmatic applications. Technical topics discussed in the book include: Cloud Computing and BigData for IoT analyticsSearching the Internet of ThingsDevelopment Tools for IoT Analytics ApplicationsIoT Analytics-as-a-ServiceSemantic Modelling and Reasoning for IoT AnalyticsIoT analytics for Smart BuildingsIoT analytics for Smart CitiesOperationalization of IoT analyticsEthical aspects of IoT analyticsThis book contains both research oriented and applied articles on IoT analytics, including several articles reflecting work undertaken in the scope of recent European Commission funded projects in the scope of the FP7 and H2020 programmes. These articles present results of these projects on IoT analytics platforms and applications. Even though several articles have been contributed by different authors, they are structured in a well thought order that facilitates the reader either to follow the evolution of the book or to focus on specific topics depending on his/her background and interest in IoT and IoT analytics technologies. The compilation of these articles in this edited volume has been largely motivated by the close collaboration of the co-authors in the scope of working groups and IoT events organized by the Internet-of-Things Research Cluster (IERC), which is currently a part of EU's Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI)

The role of semantic web technologies for IoT data in underpinning environmental science

The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has the potential to generate a huge amount of heterogeneous data at different geographical locations and with various temporal resolutions in environmental science. In many other areas of IoT deployment, volume and velocity dominate, however in environmental science, the more general pattern is quite distinct and often variety dominates. There exists a large number of small, heterogeneous and potentially complex datasets and the key challenge is to understand the interdependencies between these disparate datasets representing different environmental facets. These characteristics pose several data challenges including data interpretation, interoperability and integration, to name but a few, and there is a pressing need to address these challenges. The author postulates that Semantic Web technologies and associated techniques have the potential to address the aforementioned data challenges and support environmental science. The main goal of this thesis is to examine the potential role of Semantic Web technologies in making sense of such complex and heterogeneous environmental data in all its complexity. The thesis explores the state-of-the-art in the use of such technologies in the context of environmental science. After an in-depth assessment of related work, the thesis further examined the characteristics of environmental data through semi-structured interviews with leading experts. Through this, three key research challenges emerge: discovering interdependencies between disparate datasets, geospatial data integration and reasoning, and data heterogeneity. In response to these challenges, an ontology was developed that semantically enriches all sensor measurements stemmed from an experimental Environmental IoT infrastructure. The resultant ontology was evaluated through three real-world use-cases derived from the interviews. This led to a number of major contributions from this work including: the development of an ontology tailored for streaming environmental data offering semantic enrichment of IoT data, support for spatio-temporal data integration and reasoning, and the analysis of unique characteristics of environmental science around data

Building Blocks for IoT Analytics Internet-of-Things Analytics

Internet-of-Things (IoT) Analytics are an integral element of most IoT applications, as it provides the means to extract knowledge, drive actuation services and optimize decision making. IoT analytics will be a major contributor to IoT business value in the coming years, as it will enable organizations to process and fully leverage large amounts of IoT data, which are nowadays largely underutilized. The Building Blocks of IoT Analytics is devoted to the presentation the main technology building blocks that comprise advanced IoT analytics systems. It introduces IoT analytics as a special case of BigData analytics and accordingly presents leading edge technologies that can be deployed in order to successfully confront the main challenges of IoT analytics applications. Special emphasis is paid in the presentation of technologies for IoT streaming and semantic interoperability across diverse IoT streams. Furthermore, the role of cloud computing and BigData technologies in IoT analytics are presented, along with practical tools for implementing, deploying and operating non-trivial IoT applications. Along with the main building blocks of IoT analytics systems and applications, the book presents a series of practical applications, which illustrate the use of these technologies in the scope of pragmatic applications. Technical topics discussed in the book include: Cloud Computing and BigData for IoT analyticsSearching the Internet of ThingsDevelopment Tools for IoT Analytics ApplicationsIoT Analytics-as-a-ServiceSemantic Modelling and Reasoning for IoT AnalyticsIoT analytics for Smart BuildingsIoT analytics for Smart CitiesOperationalization of IoT analyticsEthical aspects of IoT analyticsThis book contains both research oriented and applied articles on IoT analytics, including several articles reflecting work undertaken in the scope of recent European Commission funded projects in the scope of the FP7 and H2020 programmes. These articles present results of these projects on IoT analytics platforms and applications. Even though several articles have been contributed by different authors, they are structured in a well thought order that facilitates the reader either to follow the evolution of the book or to focus on specific topics depending on his/her background and interest in IoT and IoT analytics technologies. The compilation of these articles in this edited volume has been largely motivated by the close collaboration of the co-authors in the scope of working groups and IoT events organized by the Internet-of-Things Research Cluster (IERC), which is currently a part of EU's Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI)

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