Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

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)

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Mobile computing and sensor Web services for coastal buoys

Mobile device technology with the influence of the Internet is creating a lot of Webbased services so that people can have easy and 24-hour access to the services. Recently, the Google’s Android has revolutionized applications development for the mobile platform. As there is an increasing number of companies exposing their services as Web services, enabling flexible mobile access to distributed Web resources is a relevant challenge. However, the current Web is a collection of human readable pages that are unintelligible to computer programs. Semantic Web and Web services have the potential of overcoming this limitation. For this, a standard ontology called Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S) is employed. The vision is to automatically discover services like Sensor Web services from mobile. In this thesis, a mobile framework is developed for the automatic discovery of services. The application is implemented for the Coastal Sensor Web and the Semantic Web service

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals

Enriching and validating geographic information on the web

The continuous growth of available data on the World Wide Web has led to an unprecedented amount of available information. However, the enormous variance in data quality and trustworthiness of information sources impairs the great potential of the large amount of vacant information. This observation especially applies to geographic information on the Web, i.e., information describing entities that are located on the Earth’s surface. With the advent of mobile devices, the impact of geographic Web information on our everyday life has substantially grown. The mobile devices have also enabled the creation of novel data sources such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative crowd-sourced map providing open cartographic information. Today, we use geographic information in many applications, including routing, location recommendation, or geographic question answering. The processing of geographic Web information yields unique challenges. First, the descriptions of geographic entities on the Web are typically not validated. Since not all Web information sources are trustworthy, the correctness of some geographic Web entities is questionable. Second, geographic information sources on the Web are typically isolated from each other. The missing integration of information sources hinders the efficient use of geographic Web information for many applications. Third, the description of geographic entities is typically incomplete. Depending on the application, missing information is a decisive criterion for (not) using a particular data source. Due to the large scale of the Web, the manual correction of these problems is usually not feasible such that automated approaches are required. In this thesis, we tackle these challenges from three different angles. (i) Validation of geographic Web information: We validate geographic Web information by detecting vandalism in OpenStreetMap, for instance, the replacement of a street name with advertisement. To this end, we present the OVID model for automated vandalism detection in OpenStreetMap. (ii) Enrichment of geographic Web information through integration: We integrate OpenStreetMap with other geographic Web information sources, namely knowledge graphs, by identifying entries corresponding to the same world real-world entities in both data sources. We present the OSM2KG model for automated identity link discovery between OSM and knowledge graphs. (iii) Enrichment of missing information in geographic Web information: We consider semantic annotations of geographic entities on Web pages as an additional data source. We exploit existing annotations of categorical properties of Web entities as training data to enrich missing categorical properties in geographic Web information. For all of the proposed models, we conduct extensive evaluations on real-world datasets. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed solutions reliably outperform existing baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of geographic Web Information in two application scenarios. (i) Corpus of geographic entity embeddings: We introduce the GeoVectors corpus, a linked open dataset of ready-to-use embeddings of geographic entities. With GeoVectors, we substantially lower the burden to use geographic data in machine learning applications. (ii) Application to event impact prediction: We employ several geographic Web information sources to predict the impact of public events on road traffic. To this end, we use cartographic, event, and event venue information from the Web.Durch die kontinuierliche Zunahme verfügbarer Daten im World Wide Web, besteht heute eine noch nie da gewesene Menge verfügbarer Informationen. Das große Potential dieser Daten wird jedoch durch hohe Schwankungen in der Datenqualität und in der Vertrauenswürdigkeit der Datenquellen geschmälert. Dies kann vor allem am Beispiel von geografischen Web-Informationen beobachtet werden. Geografische Web-Informationen sind Informationen über Entitäten, die über Koordinaten auf der Erdoberfläche verfügen. Die Relevanz von geografischen Web-Informationen für den Alltag ist durch die Verbreitung von internetfähigen, mobilen Endgeräten, zum Beispiel Smartphones, extrem gestiegen. Weiterhin hat die Verfügbarkeit der mobilen Endgeräte auch zur Erstellung neuartiger Datenquellen wie OpenStreetMap (OSM) geführt. OSM ist eine offene, kollaborative Webkarte, die von Freiwilligen dezentral erstellt wird. Mittlerweile ist die Nutzung geografischer Informationen die Grundlage für eine Vielzahl von Anwendungen, wie zum Beispiel Navigation, Reiseempfehlungen oder geografische Frage-Antwort-Systeme. Bei der Verarbeitung geografischer Web-Informationen müssen einzigartige Herausforderungen berücksichtigt werden. Erstens werden die Beschreibungen geografischer Web-Entitäten typischerweise nicht validiert. Da nicht alle Informationsquellen im Web vertrauenswürdig sind, ist die Korrektheit der Darstellung mancher Web-Entitäten fragwürdig. Zweitens sind Informationsquellen im Web oft voneinander isoliert. Die fehlende Integration von Informationsquellen erschwert die effektive Nutzung von geografischen Web-Information in vielen Anwendungsfällen. Drittens sind die Beschreibungen von geografischen Entitäten typischerweise unvollständig. Je nach Anwendung kann das Fehlen von bestimmten Informationen ein entscheidendes Kriterium für die Nutzung einer Datenquelle sein. Da die Größe des Webs eine manuelle Behebung dieser Probleme nicht zulässt, sind automatisierte Verfahren notwendig. In dieser Arbeit nähern wir uns diesen Herausforderungen von drei verschiedenen Richtungen. (i) Validierung von geografischen Web-Informationen: Wir validieren geografische Web-Informationen, indem wir Vandalismus in OpenStreetMap identifizieren, zum Beispiel das Ersetzen von Straßennamen mit Werbetexten. (ii) Anreicherung von geografischen Web-Information durch Integration: Wir integrieren OpenStreetMap mit anderen Informationsquellen im Web (Wissensgraphen), indem wir Einträge in beiden Informationsquellen identifizieren, die den gleichen Echtwelt-Entitäten entsprechen. (iii) Anreicherung von fehlenden geografischen Informationen: Wir nutzen semantische Annotationen von geografischen Entitäten auf Webseiten als weitere Datenquelle. Wir nutzen existierende Annotationen kategorischer Attribute von Web-Entitäten als Trainingsdaten, um fehlende kategorische Attribute in geografischen Web-Informationen zu ergänzen. Wir führen ausführliche Evaluationen für alle beschriebenen Modelle durch. Die vorgestellten Lösungsansätze erzielen verlässlich bessere Ergebnisse als existierende Ansätze. Weiterhin demonstrieren wir den Nutzen von geografischen Web-Informationen in zwei Anwendungsszenarien. (i) Korpus mit Embeddings von geografischen Entitäten: Wir stellen den GeoVectors-Korpus vor, einen verlinkten, offenen Datensatz mit direkt nutzbaren Embeddings von geografischen Web-Entitäten. Der GeoVectors-Korpus erleichtert die Nutzung von geografischen Daten in Anwendungen von maschinellen Lernen erheblich. (ii) Anwendung zur Prognose von Veranstaltungsauswirkungen: Wir nutzen Karten-, Veranstaltungs- und Veranstaltungsstätten-Daten aus dem Web, um die Auswirkungen von Veranstaltungen auf den Straßenverkehr zu prognostizieren