A software processing chain for evaluating thesaurus quality

Thesauri are knowledge models commonly used for information classification and retrieval whose structure is defined by standards that describe the main features the concepts and relations must have. However, following these standards requires a deep knowledge of the field the thesaurus is going to cover and experience in their creation. To help in this task, this paper describes a software processing chain that provides different validation components that evaluates the quality of the main thesaurus features

The development and interlinkage of a drought vocabulary in the EuroGEOSS interoperable catalogue infrastructure

Metadata catalogues are used for facilitating the discovery of data and web services in, e.g., growing collections of Earth observation resources. Two conditions need to be met in order to successfully retrieve resources in catalogues: the metadata describing resources have to be complete and accurate and the keywords used in searches semantically related to the keywords contained in the metadata descriptions. One method to increase the rate of successfully retrieved metadata in catalogues is the use of controlled vocabularies. Such vocabularies can be used for annotating metadata with appropriate keywords and then also presented to users of the catalogue for specifying search terms. In the process of preparing metadata for drought-related data and services within the EuroGEOSS project, the need of a drought-specific vocabulary arose. This paper presents this drought vocabulary, the methodology followed for its development, its integration in the EuroGEOSS drought infrastructure and discusses its usefulness for the drought thematic area. The usefulness of the vocabulary is hereby measured by an increased use of search terms coming from an appropriate vocabulary and by an increase in the successful retrieval of resources. In particular, metadata must be annotated with appropriate keywords from a controlled vocabulary, thesaurus or ontology suitable for that particular field

A method for checking the quality of geographic metadata based on ISO 19157

With recent advances in remote sensing, location-based services and other related technologies, the production of geospatial information has exponentially increased in the last decades. Furthermore, to facilitate discovery and efficient access to such information, spatial data infrastructures were promoted and standardized, with a consideration that metadata are essential to describing data and services. Standardization bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization have defined well-known metadata models such as ISO 19115. However, current metadata assets exhibit heterogeneous quality levels because they are created by different producers with different perspectives. To address quality-related concerns, several initiatives attempted to define a common framework and test the suitability of metadata through automatic controls. Nevertheless, these controls are focused on interoperability by testing the format of metadata and a set of controlled elements. In this paper, we propose a methodology of testing the quality of metadata by considering aspects other than interoperability. The proposal adapts ISO 19157 to the metadata case and has been applied to a corpus of the Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure. The results demonstrate that our quality check helps determine different types of errors for all metadata elements and can be almost completely automated to enhance the significance of metadata

Approaches for the clustering of geographic metadata and the automatic detection of quasi-spatial dataset series

The discrete representation of resources in geospatial catalogues affects their information retrieval performance. The performance could be improved by using automatically generated clusters of related resources, which we name quasi-spatial dataset series. This work evaluates whether a clustering process can create quasi-spatial dataset series using only textual information from metadata elements. We assess the combination of different kinds of text cleaning approaches, word and sentence-embeddings representations (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, ELMo, Sentence BERT, and Universal Sentence Encoder), and clustering techniques (K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, and agglomerative clustering) for the task. The results demonstrate that combining word-embeddings representations with an agglomerative-based clustering creates better quasi-spatial dataset series than the other approaches. In addition, we have found that the ELMo representation with agglomerative clustering produces good results without any preprocessing step for text cleaning

High frequency pCO2 monitoring in the Mediterranean coastal waters

Monitoring the Air-Sea pCO2 variability in the coastal areas is a priority due to the effect of the biological and biogeochemistry process on this process. The Northwestern Mediterranean Sea is an oligotrophic area in a semi-closed basin, therefore the changes on the surface waters properties take place faster than in other seas. This work focuses in the establishment of a pCO2 monitor system and other related sensors at the OBSEA surface buoy.Peer Reviewe

La ciudadanía europea: una cuestión abierta

The consolidation of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE, the provisions in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and a significant jurisprudence seem to indicate that the legal discourse about the European Citizenship is solved. This work challenges this perception.Three aspects are addressed to show the open character of the question: (i) the lack of autonomy of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE, (ii) the added difficulties stemming from the dual conception of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE and as fundamental rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and, lastly, (iii) the lack of a better discourse about the legitimacy function of citizenship. The author considers that the context of crisis and the increasing gap between citizens and EU calls for a reconsideration of the citizenship question.El discurso jurídico sobre la Ciudadanía de la Unión, tras la consolidación del estatuto del TFUE, la formulación de los derechos en la Carta de Derechos Fundamentales de la UE y una importante jurisprudencia, parece un asunto resuelto. El trabajo trata de poner en cuestión esta percepción. Tres aspectos de la ciudadanía se abordan para demostrar el carácter abierto del tema: la falta de autonomía que pesa sobre el estatuto formulado en el TFUE, las dificultades jurídicas añadidas por una articulación dual de los derechos de ciudadanía en el estatuto del TFUE y su formulación como derechos fundamentales en la Carta de Derechos Fundamentales de la Unión y, por último, la falta de un discurso mejor construido sobre la función de la ciudadanía como factor de legitimación. El autor entiende que la situación de crisis que soporta la Unión Europea y la creciente desafección de la ciudadanía llaman a un replanteamiento de un discurso claramente insuficiente.The consolidation of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE, the provisions in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and a significant jurisprudence seem to indicate that the legal discourse about the European Citizenship is solved. This work challenges this perception.Three aspects are addressed to show the open character of the question: (i) the lack of autonomy of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE, (ii) the added difficulties stemming from the dual conception of the Status of Citizenship in the TFUE and as fundamental rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and, lastly, (iii) the lack of a better discourse about the legitimacy function of citizenship. The author considers that the context of crisis and the increasing gap between citizens and EU calls for a reconsideration of the citizenship question

Una mujer salvaje entre folclore y hagiografía: Garinda en Lisuarte y Amadís de Grecia de Feliciano de Silva

Las figuras del ermitaño y el salvaje tienen puntos de contacto que les llevan a presentarse en los textos bajo una apariencia y funciones similares, en buena medida ligadas a los ritos de paso del héroe de la tradición. Es el caso de Garinda, mujer salvaje del Lisuarte y del Amadís de Grecia de Feliciano de Silva, cercana a los ejemplos de María Egipciaca y María Magdalena. Se detecta en el personaje el influjo de la ficción sentimental en su posible dependencia del Grimalte y Gradissa de Juan de Flores, a su vez posible deudor de relatos como el de san Egidio/san Gil. Queda así manifiesto el vínculo entre folklore, hagiografía y relato caballeresco Anchorites and Wild Men share formal aspects and functions related to the rites of passage concerning the hero of tradition''s journey. This paper studies the character of Garinda, Wild Woman with a relevant task in two books of chivalry by Feliciano de Silva, Lisuarte and Amadis de Grecia. Built upon the archetypes of Saint Mary of Egypt and Saint Mary Magdalene, her story also includes echoes of Juan de Flores'' Grimalte y Gradissa, novel in which the life of Saint Aegidius/Giles could have let its trace. Hagiography, Folklore and chivalric romances show their mutual influence

Blur2sharp: A gan-based model for document image deblurring

The advances in mobile technology and portable cameras have facilitated enormously the acquisition of text images. However, the blur caused by camera shake or out-of-focus problems may affect the quality of acquired images and their use as input for optical character recognition (OCR) or other types of document processing. This work proposes an end-to-end model for document deblurring using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. The main novelty of this work is to achieve blind document deblurring, i.e., deblurring without knowledge of the blur kernel. Our method, named “Blur2Sharp CycleGAN, ” generates a sharp image from a blurry one and shows how cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) can be used in document deblurring. Using only a blurred image as input, we try to generate the sharp image. Thus, no information about the blur kernel is required. In the evaluation part, we use peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) to compare the deblurring images. The experiments demonstrate a clear improvement in visual quality with respect to the state-of-the-art using a dataset of text images

Discrete Global Grid Systems with quadrangular cells as reference frameworks for the current generation of Earth observation data cubes

Discrete Global Grid Systems are spatial reference frameworks that associate information to multi-resolution grids of uniquely identified cells; they are proposed as mechanisms to facilitate the efficient integration of heterogeneous spatial data. They could provide an excellent reference system for Earth observation data cubes, technological infrastructures that provide analysis-ready access to Earth Observation big data, as long as they can be made compatible with them. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is currently feasible without requiring new technological developments. We show how a Discrete Global Grid System with quadrangular cells, rHEALPix, and an existing data cube platform, Open Data Cube, can be integrated without loosing the advantages of having all the data in a Discrete Global Grid System, while keeping a straightforward access to all of the analysis tools provided by an Earth Observation Data Cube