Automating the web publishing process of environmental data by using semantic annotations

Large amounts of environmental data are still hidden away in databases only accessible by domain experts. There is the need to make this data available to other experts for further data fusion. To implement standards like the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) huge efforts on the side of environmental agencies are required. At the same time, the pressure to make this data available to the interested public arises in form of Linked Open Data (LOD). This additional demand requires even more programming resources to fulfill the new requirements and interfaces. In this paper, we describe a system architecture, which simplifies and automates this problem of publishing environmental data in different data models. Ontologies are applied to map the different models’ syntax and semantics. Additionally, we present a proof-of-concept implementation supporting both SOS and LOD interfaces

Semantically enriching an open source sensor observation service implementation for accessing heterogeneous environmental data sources

Many kinds of environmental data are nowadays publicly available, but spread over the web. This article discusses using the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as a common interface for providing data from heterogeneous sources which can be integrated to a user tailored environmental information system. In order to allow for providing user-tailored and problem-specific information the adjusted SOS is augmented by a semantic layer which maps the environmental information to ontology concepts. The necessary information fusion from different domains and data types lead to several specific requirements for the SOS. Addressing these requirements we have implemented a SOS which still conforms to the OGC SOS 1.0.0 standard specification. The developed SOS has been integrated in a publicly available demonstrator of our personalized environmental information system. Additionally this article discusses future consequences for the SOS, caused by the recently published SOS 2.0 specification

Twitter sentiment analysis for german football matches

Football is the most famous sport in Germany. Therefore, football matces itself and incidents around the organization of football events are main topics in the media. The stakeholders involved in the organization ("Organizers Group") of football events like clubs, public transportation services, police authorities, private security services and town councils are interested in improving the football events for the "Consuming Group" (supporters, other sprctators in the stadium and TV spectators). To come up with improvements understanding the neesds and emotions of the spectator group is essential. This research paper concentrates on methods for a Sentiment Analysis of tweets in German language posted on Twitter before, during and after football matches to find out the needs and emotions of the "Consuming Group". The paper describes and evaluates methodologies for the creation of a database for football tweets, the creation of a German Football Event Vocabulary and a Sentiment Analysis of Football Matches using the database and the vocabulary

An Ontology for Cultural Heritage Protection against Climate Change

Environmental factors, worsened by the increasing climate change impact, represent significant threats to European Cultural Heritage (CH) assets. In Europe, the huge number and diversity of CH assets, together with the different climatological sub-regions aspects, as well as the different adaptation policies to climate change adopted (or to be adopted) by the different nations, generate a very complex scenario. This paper will present a multidisciplinary methodology that will bridge the gap between two different worlds: the CH stakeholders and the scientific/technological experts. Since protecting cultural heritage assets and increasing their resilience against effects caused by the climate change is a multidisciplinary task, experts from many domains need to work together to meet their conservation goals. This paper discusses a method for facilitating the work for the different experts. A new ontology has been designed integrating all necessary aspects for improving the resilience of cultural heritages on site. This ontology combines the following topics: Cultural Heritage Assets, Stakeholders and Roles, Climate and Weather Effects, Risk Management, Conservation Actions, Materials, Sensors, Models and Observations, Standard Operation Procedures/Workflows and Damages

Using crowdsource information for managing climate events through the use of modern mobile technology: Paper presented at 2nd International Conference on Citizen Observatories for natural hazards and Water Management, COWM 2018, Venice, 27-30 November 2018

- We propose a mobile application facilitating an ontology to support all participants of a climate-related crises. - Semantic classification is achieved by involving the user and without requiring semantic analysis tools. - Participants in the field can share and exchange information with the control centre. - Using multimodal input and potent analysis modules enhance situational awareness. - Additional crowdsourcing based on ontological backend offers machine-interpretable dat

The sensor to decision chain in crisis management

In every disaster and crisis, incident time is the enemy, and getting accurate information about the scope, extent, and impact of the disaster is critical to creating and orchestrating an effective disaster response and recovery effort. Decision Support Systems (DSSs) for disaster and crisis situations need to solve the problem of facilitating the broad variety of sensors available today. This includes the research domain of the Internet of Things (IoT) and data coming from social media. All this data needs to be aggregated and fused, the semantics of the data needs to be understood and the results must be presented to the decision makers in an accessible way. Furthermore, the interaction and integration with existing risk and crisis management systems are necessary for a better analysis of the situation and faster reaction times. This paper provides an insight into the sensor to decision chain and proposes solutions and technologies for each step

Harmonizing Data collection in an Ontology for a Risk Management Platform

In every disaster time is the enemy and getting accurate and helpful real time information for supporting descision support is critical. Data sources for Risk Management Platforms are heterogeneous. This includes data coming from several resources: sensors, social media, the general public and first responders. All this data needs to be analyzed, aggregated and fused and the semantics of the data needs to be understood. This paper discusses means for integrating and harmonizing data into an ICT platform for risk management and gives examples for semantic analysis

Personalized environmental service configuration and delivery orchestration: The PESCaDO demonstrator

Citizens are increasingly aware of the influence of environmental and meteorological conditions on the quality of their life. This results in an increasing demand for personalized environmental information, i.e., information that is tailored to citizens’ specific context and background. In this demonstration, we present an environmental information system that addresses this demand in its full complexity in the context of the PESCaDO EU project. Specifically, we will show a system that supports submission of user generated queries related to environmental conditions. From the technical point of view, the system is tuned to discover reliable data in the web and to process these data in order to convert them into knowledge, which is stored in a dedicated repository. At run time, this information is transferred into an ontology-based knowledge base, from which then information relevant to the specific user is deduced and communicated in the language of their preference

Getting the environmental information across: From the web to the user

Environmental and meteorological conditions are of utmost importance for the population, as they are strongly related to the quality of life. Citizens are increasingly aware of this importance. This awareness results in an increasing demand for environmental information tailored to their specific needs and background. We present an environmental information platform that supports submission of user queries related to environmental conditions and orchestrates results from complementary services to generate personalized suggestions. The system discovers and processes reliable data in the Web in order to convert them into knowledge. At runtime, this information is transferred into an ontology-structured knowledge base, from which then information relevant to the specific user is deduced and communicated in the language of their preference. The platform is demonstrated with real world use cases in the south area of Finland, showing the impact it can have on the quality of everyday life