Semantics-Aware Indexing of Geospatial Resources Based on Multilingual Thesauri: Methodology and Preliminary Results

the discovery functionality implemented by geoportals is primarily based on the syntactic matching of users’ search pattern against descriptive metadata, such as title, abstract, or keywords. As a consequence, the retrieval process is often hampered by linguistic issues related to multilingualism, semantic heterogeneity (synonymy, homonymy, etc.), and terminology mismatch in general. We propose a novel criterion for associating resources to language-neutral identifiers, thus enabling multilingual access to datasets and services as well as query expansion and refinement. The methodology has been successfully applied to the ISO-compliant metadata records aggregated by the INSPIRE Geoportal and is driving semantics-aware extensions of the discovery functionalities of the latter

Integrative Research: The EuroGEOSS Experience

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GRB 081007 AND GRB 090424: THE SURROUNDING MEDIUM, OUTFLOWS, AND SUPERNOVAE

We discuss the results of the analysis of multi-wavelength data for the afterglows of GRB 081007 and GRB 09042We discuss the results of the analysis of multi-wavelength data for the afterglows of GRB 081007 and GRB 090424, two bursts detected by Swift. One of them, GRB 081007, also shows a spectroscopically confirmed supernova, SN 2008hw, which resembles SN 1998bw in its absorption features, while the maximum magnitude may be fainter, up to 0.7 mag, than observed in SN 1998bw. Bright optical flashes have been detected in both events, which allows us to derive solid constraints on the circumburst-matter density profile. This is particularly interesting in the case of GRB081007, whose afterglow is found to be propagating into a constant-density medium, yielding yet another example of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) clearly associated with a massive star progenitor which did not sculpt the surroundings with its stellar wind. There is no supernova component detected in the afterglow of GRB090424, likely because of the brightness of the host galaxy, comparable to the Milky Way. We show that the afterglow data are consistent with the presence of both forward- and reverse-shock emission powered by relativistic outflows expanding into the interstellar medium. The absence of optical peaks due to the forward shock strongly suggests that the reverse-shock regions should be mildly magnetized. The initial Lorentz factor of outflow of GRB081007 is estimated to be ?? ~ 200, while for GRB090424 a lower limit of ?? > 170 is derived. We also discuss the prompt emission of GRB081007, which consists of just a single pulse. We argue that neither the external forward-shock model nor the shock-breakout model can account for the prompt emission data and suggest that the single-pulse-like prompt emission may be due to magnetic energy dissipation of a Poynting-flux-dominated outflow or to a dissipative photosphere

Describing Geospatial Assets in the Web of Data: A Metadata Management Scenario

Metadata management is an essential enabling factor for geospatial assets because discovery, retrieval, and actual usage of the latter are tightly bound to the quality of these descriptions. Unfortunately, the multi-faceted landscape of metadata formats, requirements, and conventions makes it difficult to identify editing tools that can be easily tailored to the specificities of a given project, workgroup, and Community of Practice. Our solution is a template-driven metadata editing tool that can be customised to any XML-based schema. Its output is constituted by standards-compliant metadata records that also have a semantics-aware counterpart eliciting novel exploitation techniques. Moreover, external data sources can easily be plugged in to provide autocompletion functionalities on the basis of the data structures made available on the Web of Data. Beside presenting the essentials on customisation of the editor by means of two use cases, we extend the methodology to the whole life cycle of geospatial metadata. We demonstrate the novel capabilities enabled by RDF-based metadata representation with respect to traditional metadata management in the geospatial domain

Towards semantics-aware annotation and retrieval of spatial data

Retrieval of spatial resources is typically hindered by the lack of exhaustive metadata, linguistic issues, multilingualism and domain-related terminology mismatch. This paper describes the set-up of a knowledge base for grounding harmonization of domain knowledge from distinct thematic areas, enable semantics-aware annotation of resources and support implementation of novel retrieval techniques. In doing so, a general work flow for translating ISO-complaint registries into SKOS/RDF data structures and enriching them of structural information is presented. The validity of the approach is then evaluated through the exploitation of the knowledge base by applications in diverse use cases.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Artificial Intelligence for Multisource Geospatial Information

The term Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) is quite cumbersome, and it has no single, shared definition [...

Enforcing and monitoring company policies on business process orchestrations

Business Process Modeling is increasingly important for the digitization of both IT and non-IT business processes, as well as for their deployment on service-oriented architectures. While a number of methodologies, languages, and software tools have been proposed to support digital business process design, a lot remains to be done for assessing a business process model validity with respect to an existing organizational structure or external constraints. This paper presents a technique for checking semantics-aware process representations w.r.t. general corporate policies and security compliance regulations

Matching SKOS Thesauri for Spatial Data Infrastructures

This paper outlines the importance of the SKOS format for developing thesauri in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures and presents a prototype application supporting one of the most important tasks for the harmonisation of thesauri in this domain, i.e., relating independent categorisations of terms that may be developed by distinct thematic communities of interest. This work outlines the main sources for SDI-related thesauri that are currently available and addresses the many challenges that shall be tackled in order to streamline the development process associated with these resources. The paper also describes the possible usages of these semantics-aware data structures for the purpose of resource annotation by metadata maintainers and query expansion processes for supporting the end user.JRC.DDG.H.6-Spatial data infrastructure

GENeric European Sustainable Information Space for Environment

This collection contains the data produced in the framework of the EU project GENESIS (FP7-ICT-2007-2 IP 223996). GENESIS (GENeric European Sustainable Information Space for Environment) was a 4-year project (2008-2011), having the objective of providing Environment management and Health actors with an innovative solution based on advanced ICT. In the framework of this project, JRC developed a platform based on Semantic Web technologies (the SemanticLab) enabling the creation, aggregation and deployment of thesauri related to geographic information, with the purpose of the purpose of grounding semantics-aware annotation and retrieval of geospatial resources.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom