Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Libraries and Information Systems Need XML/RDF... but Do They Know It?

This article presents an approach to the uses of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Semantic Web technologies in the field of information services, focusing mainly on the creation and management of digital libraries compared to traditional libraries, while paying special attention to the concept and application of metadata, and RDF based integration

Global integration of public sector information

This paper deals with technological methods for consolidating assets lists of available public sector information (PSI) for re-use. In this direction, the effort is to review the state of the art in delivering access to PSI throughout the world and to prioritize the necessary engagements for joining available PSI catalogues. We propose an architectural framework grounded on Semantic Web technologies to deliver a global platform for federated searching. A speculative survey of available PSI portals is presented, and the initial implementation, results, and analysis of the proposed architecture are covered in detail

Towards improving web service repositories through semantic web techniques

The success of the Web services technology has brought topicsas software reuse and discovery once again on the agenda of software engineers. While there are several efforts towards automating Web service discovery and composition, many developers still search for services via online Web service repositories and then combine them manually. However, from our analysis of these repositories, it yields that, unlike traditional software libraries, they rely on little metadata to support service discovery. We believe that the major cause is the difficulty of automatically deriving metadata that would describe rapidly changing Web service collections. In this paper, we discuss the major shortcomings of state of the art Web service repositories and, as a solution, we report on ongoing work and ideas on how to use techniques developed in the context of the Semantic Web (ontology learning, mapping, metadata based presentation) to improve the current situation

Spatial Search Strategies for Open Government Data: A Systematic Comparison

The increasing availability of open government datasets on the Web calls for ways to enable their efficient access and searching. There is however an overall lack of understanding regarding spatial search strategies which would perform best in this context. To address this gap, this work has assessed the impact of different spatial search strategies on performance and user relevance judgment. We harvested machine-readable spatial datasets and their metadata from three English-based open government data portals, performed metadata enhancement, developed a prototype and performed both a theoretical and user-based evaluation. The results highlight that (i) switching between area of overlap and Hausdorff distance for spatial similarity computation does not have any substantial impact on performance; and (ii) the use of Hausdorff distance induces slightly better user relevance ratings than the use of area of overlap. The data collected and the insights gleaned may serve as a baseline against which future work can compare.Comment: Paper accepted to GIR'19: 13th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (Lyon, France

Generation of navigation graphs for indoor space

This article proposes a comprehensive approach to computing a navigation graph for an indoor space. It focuses on a single floor, but the work is easily extensible to multi-level spaces. The approach proceeds by using a formal model, based on the combinatorial map but enhanced with geometric and semantic information. The process is almost fully automatic, taking as input the building plans providing the geometric structure of the floors and semantics of the building, such as functions of interior spaces, portals, etc. One of the novel aspects in this work was the use of combinatorial maps and their duals to provide a compact formal description of the topology and connectivity of the indoor structure represented by a connected, embedded graph. While making use of existing libraries for the more routine computational geometry involved, the research develops several new algorithms, including one for computing the local kernel of a region. The process is evaluated by means of a case study using part of a university building

Data DNA: The Next Generation of Statistical Metadata

Describes the components of a complete statistical metadata system and suggests ways to create and structure metadata for better access and understanding of data sets by diverse users