Geospatial Semantics

We recently proposed a definition of a language for nonmonotonic reasoning based on intuitionistic logic. Our main idea is a generalization of the notion of answer sets for arbitrary propositional theories. We call this extended framework safe beliefs. We present an algorithm, based on the Davis-Putnam (DP) method, to compute safe beliefs for arbitrary propositional theories. We briefly discuss some ideas on how to extend this paradigm to incorporate preferences. Keywords: Answer Sets, Davis Putnam, Safe Beliefs, ...

Reduced size in hand-held devices imposes significant usability and visualisation challenges. Semantic adaptation to specific usage contexts is a key feature for overcoming usability and display limitations on mobile devices. We demonstrate a novel application which: (i) links the physical world with the semantic web, facilitating context-based information access, (ii) enhances the processing of semantically enriched, linked data on mobile devices, (iii) provides an intuitive interface for mobile devices, reducing information overload.

Maps are artifacts often derived from multiple sources of data, e.g., sensors, and processed by multiple methods, e.g., gridding and smoothing algorithms. As a result, complex metadata may be required to describe maps semantically. This paper presents an approach to describe maps by annotating associated provenance. Knowledge provenance can represent a semantic annotation mechanism that is more scalable than direct annotation of map. Semantic annotation of maps through knowledge provenance provides several benefits to end users. For example, a user study is presented showing that scientists with different levels of expertise and background are able to evaluate the quality of maps by analyzing their knowledge provenance information.

models are placed by modeling paradigm at the center of development process. These models are represented by languages, like UML the language standardized by the OMG which became necessary for development. Moreover the ontology engineering paradigm places ontologies at the center of development process, in this paradigm we find OWL the explicitation language adopted by a great community of users like the principal language of knowledge representation. The bringing between UML and OWL appeared on several regards such as the classes and associations. In this paper, we propose an approach based graph transformation and registered in the MDA architecture for the automatic generation of usable OWL ontology from UML class diagrams. The transformation is based on transformation rules make it possible to achieve our aim. This approach is illustrated by an example. General Terms Ontology engineering, software engineering, model transformation. KeywordsOntologie, OWL, ATOM3, MDA.

The LinkedUp Catalogue of Web datasets for education is a meta-dataset dedicated to supporting people and applications in discovering, exploring and using Web data for the purpose of innovative, educational services. It is also an evolving dataset, with most of its content being contributed by automatically extracting relevant information from external descriptions and the included datasets themselves. In this paper, we describe the purpose and content of this dataset, as well as the way it is being created, published and maintained.

Extensive collections of data of linguistic, historical and socio-cultural importance are stored in libraries, museums and national archives with enormous potential to support research. However, a sizable portion of the data remains underutilised because of a lack of the required knowledge to model the data semantically and convert it into a format suitable for the semantic web. Although many institutions have produced digital versions of their collection, semantic enrichment, interlinking and exploration are still missing from digitised versions. In this paper, we present a model that provides structure and semantics to a non-standard linguistic and historical data collection on the example of the Bavarian dialects in Austria at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. We followed a semantic modelling approach that utilises the knowledge of domain experts and the corresponding schema produced during the data collection process. The model is used to enrich, interlink and publish the collec...

Une pensée émue pour tous les étudiants avec qui j'ai partagé une salle, un café, des bières, un repas ou quelques moments de doute pendant ces trois années : Guillaume, Mado, Ronan, Grégoire, Majed, Céline et toute la troupe du LMTG. Une pensée toute particuliere pour Bernard avec qui je partage le bureau depuis plus de deux ans. Je pense aussi à tout ceux qui m'ont permis de me vider la tête en sortant du labo durant ces

aS Infraestruturas de Dados Espaciais (IDEs), comprovadamente fundamentais na administração pública em diversas esferas de governo, vêm sendo definidas, sem atribuição única, como um sistema dos sistemas (system of systems), que interconectam pessoas, processos, dados e tecnologias. No entanto, a implementação, uso e atualização dos dados provenientes dessas Infraestruturas fundamentais não deve se limitar ao contexto governamental, devendo o setor privado se debruçar sobre estas no contexto da Transformação Digital, podendo obter benefícios significativos por meio de gestão em diversos níveis, bem como permitindo a transparência nos processos empresariais.

The Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA) project is a joint activity of the European and Canadian Space Agencies lead by ESA through its Ground Segment Coordination Body (GSCB). It aims to provide a seamless and harmonised access to ...

Humans tend to interpret a temporal series of geographical spatial data in terms of geographical processes. They also often ascribe certain properties to processes (e.g. a process may be said to accelerate). Given a spatial region of observation, distinct properties may be observed in different subregions and at different times, which causes difficulties for humans to identify them. The conceptualisation of geographical features and their correlation with geographical phenomena may provide a human like approach to analyse large spatio-temporal datasets. This paper presents a representational model and a reasoning mechanism to analyse evolving geographical features and their relationship to geographical processes. The proposed approach comprises methods of relating occurrences of geographical events to geographical processes which is said to proceed over time. We introduce an initial set of properties which can be associated with several geographical processes. We consider this as a first step towards a more general model for representing and reasoning about geographical processes.

Ontologies play an important role in semantic web applications and are often developed by different groups and continues to evolve over time. The knowledge in ontologies changes very rapidly that make the applications outdated if they continue to use old versions or unstable if they jump to new versions. Temporal frames using frame versioning and slot versioning are used to take care of dynamic nature of the ontologies. The paper proposes new tags and restructured OWL format enabling the applications to work with the old or new version of ontologies. Gene Ontology, a very dynamic ontology, has been used as a case study to explain the OWL Ontology with Temporal Tags.

Primeiramente, agradeço a Deus por tudo que tenho alcançado, pela saúde e força que Ele tem me concedido para que eu lute em prol de meus ideais. Gostaria de agradecer à minha família, e de uma forma especial, à Mara, pelo amor, carinho e apoio proporcionado durante este período em que estive cursando o mestrado. Gostaria de agradecer aos meus orientadores, Prof.ª Valéria Times e o Prof. Roberto Barros, pela confiança depositada. Aos colegas do Projeto GOLAPA, Robson, Juliano e Viviane, pelas produtivas discussões, as quais foram de grande utilidade durante o processo de desenvolvimento desta dissertação. Não poderia faltar o profundo agradecimento aos meus irmãos Cleber e Tarcísio, pelo companheirismo e ambiente familiar proporcionado durante estes dois anos de caminhada.

MOTIIVE (Marine Overlays on Topography for annex II Valuation and Exploitation) is a project funded as a Specific Support Action (SSA) under the European Commission Framework Programme 6 (FP6) Aeronautics and Space Programme. The project started in September 2005 and finished in October 2007. The objective of MOTIIVE was to examine the methodology and cost benefit of using non-proprietary data standards. Specifically it considered the harmonisation requirements between the INSPIRE data component ‘elevation’ (terrestrial, bathymetric and coastal) and INSPIRE marine thematic data for ‘sea regions’, ‘oceanic spatial features’ and ‘coastal zone management areas’. This was examined in context of the requirements for interoperable information systems as required to realise the objectives of GMES for ‘global services’. The work draws particular conclusions on the realisation of Feature Types (ISO 19109) and Feature Type Catalogues (ISO 19110) in this respect. More information on MOTIIVE ca...

Often the information present in a spatial knowledge base is represented at a different level of granularity and abstraction than the query constraints. For querying ontology's containing spatial information, the precise relationships between spatial entities has to be specified in the basic graph pattern of SPARQL query which can result in long and complex queries. We present a novel approach to help users intuitively write SPARQL queries to query spatial data, rather than relying on knowledge of the ontology structure. Our framework rewrites queries, using transformation rules to exploit part-whole relations between geographical entities to address the mismatches between query constraints and knowledge base. Our experiments were performed on completely third party datasets and queries. Evaluations were performed on Geonames dataset using questions from National Geographic Bee serialized into SPARQL and British Administrative Geography Ontology using questions from a popular trivia website. These experiments demonstrate high precision in retrieval of results and ease in writing queries.

Ontologies as well as controlled vocabularies, and domain-specific terminologies are increasingly being developed to capture semantics for life science applications. A requirement for database systems is to allow the domain of a table column to be such hierarchical terminologies and to provide query support. The paper addresses this requirement by introducing the notion of a semantic domain for relational data and providing the capability of querying over such relational data. Specifically, 1) OWL ontologies are used to model semantic domains, 2) A set of semantic-match SQL operators, namely, ONT_RELATED, ONT_DISTANCE, and ONT_PATH are introduced, to query over columns with respect to a semantic domain, 3) A new indexing scheme ONT_INDEXTYPE is introduced to speed up such queries, and 4) ONT_EXPAND operator is provided to query ontologies directly. Our approach enables users to query relational data with respect to a semantic domain using SQL operators, thereby opening up possibilit...

The dissolution of marriage is a complex social phenomenon that needs new topics of investigation, especially concerning the role of legal institutions in the conflict between partners. The research aims to identify the main issues that emerge in the institutional dimension of the phenomenon, identifying evolution and complexity of this within the sentences of the Italian Court of Cassation. Through judgments' analysis we can trace the variety of the phenomenon and identify interpretations of law in line with the evolution of contemporary institutions. The sentences are inserted in a demographic framework and are subsequently explored with topic probabilistic model (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), aimed to trace latent topic. In conclusion, the topics extracted refer to three main-dimensions, one to the procedural phases, another concerns the difficulty of leaving the separation phase and ending up in divorce, and finally the debate on the social-economic measures of divorce maintenance.

The traditional Web services architecture uses a keyword based search to match a query to one or more service providers. However, a world-toword matching to discover a service provider is too simplistic for geospatial data and fails to capture matches that advertise their functionality using domaindependent terminology. In this paper, we present DAGIS (Discovering Annotated Geospatial Information Services)-a semantic Web services based framework for geospatial domain that has graphical interface to query and discover services. It handles the semantic heterogeneities involved in the discovery phase and we propose algorithms for selecting the best service through QoS (Quality of Service) based semantic matching. The framework is capable of performing dynamic compositions on the fly through a back chaining algorithm. The framework is evaluated by solving queries posed by users in various geospatial decision making scenarios.

A geo-ontology has a key role to play in the development of a spatially aware search engine, with regard to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking and web resource annotation. This paper reviews those functions and identifies the challenges arising in the construction and maintenance of such an ontology. Two current contenders for the representation of the geo-ontology are GML, a specific markup language for geographic domains and OWL, a generic ontology representation language. Both languages are used to model the geo-ontology designed for supporting web retrieval of geographic concepts. The powers and limitations of the languages are identified. In particular, the paper highlights the lack of representation and reasoning abilities for different types of rules needed for supporting the geo-ontology.

Resumo-Com a importância cada vez maior das águas subterrâneas como recurso hídrico e com a implementação de novas legislações sobre o uso dos recursos hídricos, há uma necessidade crescente de um sistema eficiente para armazenamento e consulta de dados hidrogeológicos que seja disponível ao público. A disponibilidade de um sistema de informação de águas subterrâneas

Through this paper we present a method for automatic<br> generation of ontological model from any data source using Model<br> Driven Architecture (MDA), this generation is dedicated to the<br> cooperation of the knowledge engineering and software engineering.<br> Indeed, reverse engineering of a data source generates a software<br> model (schema of data) that will undergo transformations to generate<br> the ontological model. This method uses the meta-models to validate<br> software and ontological models.

Lack of sufficient semantic description in the content of Web services makes it difficult to find and compose suitable Web services during analysis, search, and matching processes. Semantic Web Services are Web services that have been enhanced with formal semantic description, which provides well-defined meaning. Due to insertion of semantics, meeting user demands will be made possible through logical deductions achieving resolutions automatically. We have developed an inference-based semantic business process composition agent (SCA) that employs inference techniques. The semantic composition agent system is responsible for the synthesis of new services from existing ones in a semi-automatic fashion. SCA System composes available Web Ontology Language for Web services atomic processes utilizing Revised Armstrong's Axioms (RAAs) in inferring functional dependencies. RAAs are embedded in the knowledge base ontologies of SCA System. Experiments show that the proposed SCA System pro...

A  Infraestrutura  Nacional  de  Dados  Espaciais  (INDE),  a  plataforma  principal  de  dados geoespaciais do Brasil, é o foco deste artigo que avalia a usabilidade do seu geoportal. A INDE, por meio do seu portal, oferece acesso a dados geoespaciais e metadados de diversas instituições públicas. Para a avaliação de usabilidade, foram realizadas provas de tarefas utilizando  a metodologia Think Aloude aplicação do  questionário SUS (System Usability Scale) através de entrevistas e questionário online. Embora os testes tenham demonstrado um índice de sucesso significativo, os participantes expressaram dificuldades na execução das  tarefas,  destacando  o  visualizador  de  mapas  como  o  aspecto  mais  problemático  do portal, devido à forma como os dados são apresentados. Esta apresentação pode ser um obstáculo para usuários não especializados, podendo até levar à desistência no processo de obtenção de dados. Os resultados obtidos através das entrevistas e questionários remotos enfatizam  a  necessidade  e  viabilidade  de  aplicar  uma  metodologia  que  leve  em  conta  a opinião dos usuários na criação de sistemas eficazes.Palavras-chave: Dados  Geoespaciais.  Teste  de  usabilidade.  Infraestruturas  de  Dados Espaciais.

Data owners are creating an ever richer set of information resources online, and these are being used for more and more applications. Spatial data on the Web is becoming ubiquitous and voluminous with the rapid growth of location-based services, spatial technologies, dynamic location-based data and services published by different organizations. However, the heterogeneity and the peculiarities of spatial data, such as the use of different coordinate reference systems, make it difficult for data users, Web applications, and services to discover, interpret and use the information in the large and distributed system that is the Web. To make spatial data more effectively available, this paper summarizes the work of the joint W3C/OGC Working Group on Spatial Data on the Web that identifies 14 best practices for publishing spatial data on the Web. The paper extends that work by presenting the identified challenges and rationale for selection of the recommended best practices, framed by the set of principles that guided the selection. It describes best practices that are employed to enable publishing, discovery and retrieving (querying) spatial data on the Web, and identifies some areas where a best practice has not yet emerged.

Data is of high quality if it is fit for its intended use in operations, decision-making, and planning. There is a colossal amount of linked data available on the web. However, it is difficult to understand how well the linked data fits into the modeling tasks due to the defects present in the data. Faults emerged in the linked data, spreading far and wide, affecting all the services designed for it. Addressing linked data quality deficiencies requires identifying quality problems, quality assessment, and the refinement of data to improve its quality. This study aims to identify existing end-to-end frameworks for quality assessment and improvement of data quality. One important finding is that most of the work deals with only one aspect rather than a combined approach. Another finding is that most of the framework aims at solving problems related to DBpedia. Therefore, a standard scalable system is required that integrates the identification of quality issues, the evaluation, and the improvement of the linked data quality. This survey contributes to understanding the state of the art of data quality evaluation and data quality improvement. A solution based on ontology is also proposed to build an end-to-end system that analyzes quality violations' root causes.

Abstract: Research in the earth sciences requires access to large and complex datasets. These data include in-situ and remote-sensed observations, and a variety of model output. Storage methods are as diverse as the data types and include numerous file formats and relational database systems. In practice, considerable effort is expended in data handling. Processing software choice is constrained by file format compatibility, and data object representations are coerced onto physical storage artefacts.

Probabilistic theories of semantic category formation in cognitive psychology can be used to model how semantic sense may be built up in the aggregate by a network of cooperating users. A model based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation is applied to word activity data in the Lostpedia wiki to reveal the structure of topics being written about, the trends in attention devoted to topics, and relating the model inferences to events known to have occurred in the real world. Relevance of the models to progress in exploratory search and social information foraging is discussed. .

Este trabalho discute o uso das Tecnologias de Informação Geográfica (TIG) como um apoio importante e necessário no processo de tomada de decisão em políticas públicas de controle da violência pelos gestores públicos de administrações municipais. Apresenta o software SiViU (Sistema de Informação Sobre Violência Urbana), desenvolvido pelo Grupo de Estudo e Análise de Fenômenos da Violência Urbana (GestaFUV). A partir dos dados das ocorrências policiais, coletados junto aos órgãos da segurança pública, este software pode realizar mapeamento da criminalidade para qualquer região definida pelo usuário, além de possibilitar a realização de diversas análises estatísticas, ferramentas importantes para dar suporte aos gestores públicos em suas tomadas de decisão.

The paper presents work on implementation of semantic technologies within a geospatial environment to provide a common base for further semantic interpretation. The work adds on the current works in similar areas where priorities are more on spatial data integration. We assert that having a common unified semantic view on heterogeneous datasets provides a dimension that allows us to extend beyond conventional concepts of searchability, reusability, composability and interoperability of digital geospatial data. It provides contextual understanding on geodata that will enhance effective interpretations through possible reasoning capabilities. We highlight this through use cases in disaster management and planned land use that are significantly different. This paper illustrates the work that firstly follows existing Semantic Web standards when dealing with vector geodata and secondly extends current standards when dealing with raster geodata and more advanced geospatial operations.

With the spread of distance education courses, an increasingly common problem is the lack of a personalized support and the delay in responding by mediators and other colleagues to doubts and requests from students in Learning Management Systems (LMSs), or Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), usually posted on discussion forums or manifested via email. The approach taken to solving this problem presented in this dissertation is based on multi-agent systems and an extended ontology of the IMS Learner Information Package (LIP) standard from the theory of skills and competencies developed by the Swiss sociologist Philippe Perrenoud. It is proposed here that doubts of the students are detected by the agents and the ontology. So, these doubts are directed to community members who have the best suited profile resolve it, i. e., for those who have the appropriate skills and competencies decreasing the delayed response to questions from students. Thus, students can interact with each other in order to resolve any doubts or errors in certain activities, sharing knowledge. The solution described in this dissertation is based on collaborative learning through interaction between students, which is a strategy employed in order to build knowledge more meaningfully in a VLE. The agents and the ontology also perform the recommendation process. To validate the system, we developed a Petri Net that represents the interactions between agents, and simulate the correct order of execution or the parallelism between them. From these notions, we implemented a multi-agent system that uses the competency-based learner model ontology that was used to assist students and tutors on a course of Numerical Analysis making use of the Moodle VLE. The results obtained with the tests applied in the system, discussed throughout the paper, demonstrate the validity and feasibility of the proposal, comprised of two stages: a simulation on a fictional class in order to evaluate the effectiveness of agents and the ontology and other test in a real class, with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of the recommendation process among students. Survey questionnaires were spent in the classroom in order to obtain and evaluate the students' impressions about the resources available to them in the VLE.

An important challenge for today's environmental applications is to support the migration of environmental models to be provided as a service on the Web, and to be able to use other services, in the context of a potential wider environmental user community of service providers and service consumers. We refer to this shift in the way environmental modes are provided as Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). This paper briefly presents MaaS and introduces ENVISION-an easy-to-use framework to support the emerging MaaS paradigm. We propose a general architecture (comprising components ranging from environmental Web portals to semantic service annotations to adaptive service chains execution) for ENVISION. Our architectural choices are motivated and validated by two scenarios (one from oils spill and the other from landslide monitoring and analysis), which we present in this paper. Finally, we identify a set of general scenarios supported by the ENVISION framework.

Introduction The Semantic Web community provides a common Resource Description Framework (RDF) that allows representation of resources such that they can be linked. To maximize the potential of linked data - machine-actionable interlinked resources on the Web - a certain level of quality of RDF resources should be established, particularly in the biomedical domain in which concepts are complex and high-quality biomedical ontologies are in high demand. However, it is unclear which quality metrics for RDF resources exist that can be automated, which is required given the multitude of RDF resources. Therefore, we aim to determine these metrics and demonstrate an automated approach to assess such metrics of RDF resources. Methods An initial set of metrics are identified through literature, standards, and existing tooling. Of these, metrics are selected that fulfil these criteria: (1) objective; (2) automatable; and (3) foundational. Selected metrics are represented in RDF and semantical...

MOTIIVE (Marine Overlays on Topography for annex II Valuation and Exploitation) is a project funded as a Specific Support Action (SSA) under the European Commission Framework Programme 6 (FP6) Aeronautics and Space Programme. The project started in September 2005 and finished in October 2007. The objective of MOTIIVE was to examine the methodology and cost benefit of using non-proprietary data standards. Specifically it considered the harmonisation requirements between the INSPIRE data component ‘elevation’ (terrestrial, bathymetric and coastal) and INSPIRE marine thematic data for ‘sea regions’, ‘oceanic spatial features’ and ‘coastal zone management areas’. This was examined in context of the requirements for interoperable information systems as required to realise the objectives of GMES for ‘global services’. The work draws particular conclusions on the realisation of Feature Types (ISO 19109) and Feature Type Catalogues (ISO 19110) in this respect. More information on MOTIIVE ca...

MOTIIVE (Marine Overlays on Topography for annex II Valuation and Exploitation) is a project funded as a Specific Support Action (SSA) under the European Commission Framework Programme 6 (FP6) Aeronautics and Space Programme. The project started in September 2005 and finished in October 2007. The objective of MOTIIVE was to examine the methodology and cost benefit of using non-proprietary data standards. Specifically it considered the harmonisation requirements between the INSPIRE data component ‘elevation’ (terrestrial, bathymetric and coastal) and INSPIRE marine thematic data for ‘sea regions’, ‘oceanic spatial features’ and ‘coastal zone management areas’. This was examined in context of the requirements for interoperable information systems as required to realise the objectives of GMES for ‘global services’. The work draws particular conclusions on the realisation of Feature Types (ISO 19109) and Feature Type Catalogues (ISO 19110) in this respect. More information on MOTIIVE ca...

Operations focused on the integration and filtering of concepts and propositions from various concept maps are presented as a Concept Maps Query Language (CMQL), representing a novel approach to automatically obtain knowledge from a concept map repository. Additionally, the mapping between concept maps and ontologies is described as a formal transformation method, which semantically analyzes the relationships among concepts in the map. A context in which CMQL can be useful is as support in the construction of the concept map (conceptualization) to be formalized in a preliminary ontology.

Spatial quality assessment is based on the conformance of data to its specifications or fitness for users' purpose. These specifications and the users' purposes include the rules and constraints that a dataset should comply with. Assessing the compliance of data to the rules is still an active research subject and rule-based approach is the common method. For the efficient rule-based system implementation, it is desired to automate assessment process with a domain-independent and web-based approach. Reasoning capability and re-usability of semantic web components are expected to promote efficient implementation. In literature, many domains such as agriculture, music, Linked Data and geospatial domain etc. apply ontology-based methods for quality management. There is a need to model geospatial quality concepts and rules in a domain-independent way to automate the quality management process. In our model of rule formalism, we use Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). We devise two types of ontologies. These are; the specification ontologies (SfO) and the Spatial Data Quality Ontology (SDQO). SfO is to be created by domain experts/users to define rules according to specifications. SDQO is responsible with quality assessment; it is domain independent and makes assessment based on the rules defined by any SfO for the related domain. The quality elements are domain and toposemantic consistency that assessed by SWRL. In this paper, the design considerations of the ontologies for quality assessment are explained with an example. 1.

This paper introduces the MICOLL Map, a digital historical map which is currently under construction by the ERC-funded project MICOLL: Migrating Commercial Law and Language: Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11th-17th Centuries). The eventual aim of the map is to display the changing routes by which goods and information circulated in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, with an initial focus on Northern Italy, Southern Germany, and Trans-Alpine exchange. The paper will firstly survey existing digital historical mapping tools before explaining how the MICOLL Map aims to go beyond the current state of the art in a number of ways, chiefly through the promotion of source transparency which will enable the map to be used as a source by professional historians. The second half of the paper will outline the current technical solutions in place to achieve this.

University data is typically stored in separate data silos even though the data is implicitly richly related together. Such data has a large and diverse user base, including faculty members, students, industrial partners, alumnis, collaborating universities, and media. In this paper, we demonstrate two tools for understanding and using the contents of linked university data. The first tool, Visualization Playground (VISU), supports querying and visualizing the data for example for illustrating emerging trends in universities (e.g., about publications) and for comparing differences. The second tool, Vocabulary Visualizer (V 2), demonstrates the usage of shared vocabularies in the Linked University Data Cloud. It reveals what kinds of data different universities have published, and what terms are used to describe the contents. Such analysis is a basis for facilitating design of Linked Data applications across university data boundaries.

In the Big Data era data visualization and exploration systems, as means for data perception and manipulation are facing major challenges. One of the challenges for modern visualization systems is to ensure adequate visual presentation and interaction.  Therefore, within this paper, we present a tool for interactive visualization of data with a hierarchical structure. It is a general-purpose tool that uses a graph-based approach. However, its main focus is on the visual analysis of concept lattices generated as the output of the Formal Concept Analysis algorithm. As the data grow, concept lattice can become complex and hard for visualization and analysis. In order to address this issue, functionalities important for the exploration of the large concept lattices are applied within this tool. The usage of the tool is presented in the example of visualization of concept lattices generated based on the available data on the Canadas open data portal and can be used for exploring the usag...

The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users' attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.

Thesis submitted to Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) and International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Joint program of Master of Science in Geoinformatics ... Chairman: Prof. (Dr). ...

Welcome to this special issue of the Semantic Web (SWJ) journal. The special issue compiles three technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art in exploration of semantic data using semantic web techniques and technologies.

We propose an approach to semantically enrich metadata records of satellite imagery with external data. As a result we are able the identify relevant images using a larger set of matching criteria. Conventional methods for annotating data sets are usually based on metadata records (with attributes such as title, provider, access mode, and spatiotemporal characteristics), which offer a narrow view of the world. Enriching metadata with contextual information (i.e., the region depicted in the image has been recently affected by extreme weather) requires formalizing spatio-temporal relationships between metadata records and external data sources. Semantic technologies play a key role in such scenarios by providing an infrastructure based on RDF and ontologies.

The textual geographical information is frequently organized around spatial named entities. Such entities have intrinsic ambiguities and Named Entity Recognition and Classification methods should be improved in order to handle this problem. This article describes a knowledge-based method implementing a full process with the aim of annotating in a more precise way the spatial information in the textual documents. This gain in accuracy guarantees a better analysis of the spatial information and a better disambiguation of places. The backbone of our proposal is a construction grammar and a cascaded finite-state transducers. The evaluation shows that the introduced concept of hierarchical overlapping, is very helpful to detect a local context associated with Named Entities. Keywords-Geo-information processing; Geo-spatial Web Services and processing; Geo-spatial data mining.