Towards Interactive Geodata Analysis through a Combination of Domain-Specific Languages and 3D Geo Applications in a Web Portal Environment

Urban planning processes affect a wide range of stakeholders including decision makers, urban planners, business companies as well as citizens. ICT-enabled tools supporting urban planning are considered key to successful and sustainable urban management. Based on previous work in the areas of web-based participation tools for urban planning, rule-based geospatial processing as well as 3D virtual reality applications we present a tool that supports experts from municipalities in planning and decision making but also provides a way for the public to engage in urban planning processes. The main contribution of this work is in the combination of 3D visualization and interaction components with a new ontology-driven rule editor based on domain-specific languages. The 3D visualization, on the one hand, enables stakeholders to present and discuss urban plans. On the other hand, the rule editor particularly targets expert users who need to perform spatial analyses on urban data or want to configure the 3D scene according to custom rules. Compared to previous approaches we propose a portable and interactive solution. Our tool is web-based and uses HTML5 technology making it accessible by a broad audience

Automatic integration of spatial data in viewing services

Geoportals are increasingly used for searching viewing and downloading spatial data. This study concerns methods to improve the visual presentation in viewing services. When spatial data in a viewing service are taken from more than one source there are often syntactic semantic topological and geometrical conflicts that prevent maps being fully consistent. In this study we extend a standard view service with methods to solve these conflicts. The methods are based on: (1) semantic labels of data in basic services (2) a rule-base in the portal layer and (3) integration methods in the portal layer. To evaluate the methodology we use a case study for adding historical borders on top of a base-map. The results show that the borders are overlaid on top of the map without conflicts and that a consistent map is generated automatically as an output. The methodology can be generalized to add other types of data on top of a base-map

Ontology of core concept data types for answering geo-analytical questions

In geographic information systems (GIS), analysts answer questions by designing workflows that transform a certain type of data into a certain type of goal. Semantic data types help constrain the application of computational methods to those that are meaningful for such a goal. This prevents pointless computations and helps analysts design effective workflows. Yet, to date it remains unclear which types would be needed in order to ease geo-analytical tasks. The data types and formats used in GIS still allow for huge amounts of syntactically possible but nonsensical method applications. Core concepts of spatial information and related geo-semantic distinctions have been proposed as abstractions to help analysts formulate analytic questions and to compute appropriate answers over geodata of different formats. In essence, core concepts reflect particular interpretations of data which imply that certain transformations are possible. However, core concepts usually remain implicit when operating on geodata, since a concept can be represented in a variety of forms. A central question therefore is: Which semantic types would be needed to capture this variety and its implications for geospatial analysis? In this article, we propose an ontology design pattern of core concept data types that help answer geo-analytical questions. Based on a scenario to compute a liveability atlas for Amsterdam, we show that diverse kinds of geo-analytical questions can be answered by this pattern in terms of valid, automatically constructible GIS workflows using standard sources

Anotação semântica de dados geoespaciais para a agricultura.

Dados geoespaciais são base para sistemas de decisão em vários domínios. Para serem usados esses dados precisam ser analisados e interpretados por especialistas. Essas interpretações geralmente não são armazenadas ou correspondem apenas a alguma informação textual e em linguagem própria, gravadas em arquivos técnicos. A ausência de soluções eficientes para armazená-las leva a problemas como retrabalho e dificuldades de compartilhamento de informação. Este trabalho apresenta uma solução para esse problema que baseia-se no uso de anotações semânticas, uma abordagem que promove um entendimento comum dos conceitos usados. Com a adoção de workflows científicos e também de um esquema de metadados e de ontologias bem conhecidos, foi especificado e parcialmente implementado um framework para anotação semântica de dados geoespaciais, focando na solução de problemas em agricultura.bitstream/item/32414/1/BolPesq25.pd

A geometric configuration ontology to support spatial querying

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.A number of ontologies of spatial relations have been defined in the literature, but most of these are either confined to a small subset of relations, or focussed on language expressions, and not specified geometrically. This paper presents an ontology of geometric configurations, to reflect and specify the range of spatial relations that have been discussed by previous researchers and that are commonly expressed in natural language, and to provide a sufficiently specific definition of the relations to allow them to be executed as spatial queries. Although this work was motivated by a goal to translate natural language describing location into spatial queries, we anticipate wider applications of the ontology for other purposes. We define a three level ontology, informed by the literature and the study of a corpus of expressions of natural language geospatial location descriptions, and present the concepts and the definition using spatial queries

Distinguishing extensive and intensive properties for meaningful geocomputation and mapping

A most fundamental and far-reaching trait of geographic information is the distinction between extensive and intensive properties. In common understanding, originating in Physics and Chemistry, extensive properties increase with the size of their supporting objects, while intensive properties are independent of this size. It has long been recognized that the decision whether analytical and cartographic measures can be meaningfully applied depends on whether an attribute is considered intensive or extensive. For example, the choice of a map type as well as the application of basic geocomputational operations, such as spatial intersections, aggregations or algebraic operations such as sums and weighted averages, strongly depend on this semantic distinction. So far, however, the distinction can only be drawn in the head of an analyst. We still lack practical ways of automation for composing GIS workflows and to scale up mapping and geocomputation over many data sources, e.g. in statistical portals. In this article, we test a machine-learning model that is capable of labeling extensive/ intensive region attributes with high accuracy based on simple characteristics extractable from geodata files. Furthermore, we propose an ontology pattern that captures central applicability constraints for automating data conversion and mapping using Semantic Web technology

Development of an interface for ontology‐based transformation between features of different types

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesImplementation of the INSPIRE directive, the spatial data infrastructure for the Europe, has created a necessity for easy and convenient conversion between different models of geospatial data. Data model transformation across heterogeneous systems can be hampered by differences in terminology and conceptualization, particularly when multiple communities are involved. Requirement in current situation is an interface facilitating transformation of data to a desired format and immediate use of the data, which are collected from different formats and models. Ontology-aware software with shared understanding of concepts, enable users to interact with geospatial data models. Thus use of ontologies could make a friendly environment to the user in translating the data conveniently. Feature type ontologies, along with annotations are provided from an ongoing project at the Institute for Geoinformatics (IfGI, University of Münster, Germany), in order to reconcile differences in semantics. FME workbench provides a successful environment to execute set of rules for the data model transformation using a mapping file, which can be developed externally. The thesis work developed a user interface that includes operations to define rules for the translation of geospatial data, from one model to another. Annotated feature types are taken as input, and the results are encoded as FME Mapping files. The overall methodology involves three phases.(...

Anotación semántica de Web Feature Services

Los servicios WFS permiten recuperar información geográfica de features. La anotación semántica de estos servicios proporciona beneficios en tareas relacionadas con el descubrimiento, composición y mediación de servicios. La principal contribución de este trabajo consiste en proponer un proceso para la automatización de la anotación semántica de servicios WFS. Para estas anotaciones se utilizan diversos recursos, tales como: ontologías y conjuntos de datos presentes en la nube de Linked Dat

Viewpoints on emergent semantics

Authors include:Philippe Cudr´e-Mauroux, and Karl Aberer (editors), Alia I. Abdelmoty, Tiziana Catarci, Ernesto Damiani, Arantxa Illaramendi, Robert Meersman, Erich J. Neuhold, Christine Parent, Kai-Uwe Sattler, Monica Scannapieco, Stefano Spaccapietra, Peter Spyns, and Guy De Tr´eWe introduce a novel view on how to deal with the problems of semantic interoperability in distributed systems. This view is based on the concept of emergent semantics, which sees both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics. We highlight some of the distinctive features of our vision and point out preliminary examples of its applicatio

Retrieval and interpretation of textual geolocalized information based on semantic geolocalized relations

This paper describes a method for geolocalized information retrieval from natural language text and its interpretation by assigning them geographic coordinates. A proof-of-concept implementation is discussed, along with geolocalized dictionary stored in PostGIS/PostgreSQL spatial relational database. Discussed research focuses on strongly inflectional Polish language, hence additional complexity had to be taken into account. Presented method has been evaluated with the use of diverse metrics