Geospatial Semantics And The Semantic Web

The availability of geographic and geospatial information and services, especially on the open Web has become abundant in the last several years with the proliferation of online maps, geo-coding services, geospatial Web services and geospatially enabled applications. The need for geospatial reasoning has significantly increased in many everyday applications including personal digital assistants, Web search applications, local aware mobile services, specialized systems for emergency response, medical triaging, intelligence analysis and more. Geospatial Semantics and the Semantic Web: Foundations, Algorithms, and Applications, an edited volume contributed by world class leaders in this field, provides recent research in the theme of geospatial semantics. This edited volume presents new information systems applications that have potential for high impact and commercialization. Also, special effort was made by the contributors to focus on geospatial ontology development, related standards, geospatial ontology alignment and integration, and algorithmic techniques for geospatial semantics. Case studies and examples will be provided throughout this book as well as possibilities for future research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2005, held in Mexico City, Mexico in November 2005. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theories for the semantics of geospatial information, formal representations for geospatial data, similarity comparison of spatial data sets, ontology-based spatial information retrieval, and geospatial semantic Web.

This book covers key issues related to Geospatial Semantic Web, including geospatial web services for spatial data interoperability; geospatial ontology for semantic interoperability; ontology creation, sharing, and integration; querying knowledge and information from heterogeneous data source; interfaces for Geospatial Semantic Web, VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) and Geospatial Semantic Web; challenges of Geospatial Semantic Web; and development of Geospatial Semantic Web applications. This book also describes state-of-the-art technologies that attempt to solve these problems such as WFS, WMS, RDF, OWL and GeoSPARQL and demonstrates how to use the Geospatial Semantic Web technologies to solve practical real-world problems such as spatial data interoperability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2011, held in Brest, France, in May 2011. The 13 papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers focus on formal and semantic approaches, time and activity-based patterns, ontologies, as well as quality, conflicts and semantic integration. They are organized in topical sections on ontologies and gazetteers, activity-based and temporal issues, models, quality and semantic similarities, and retrieval and discovery methods.

– semantic caching – data warehousing and semantic data mining – spatial, temporal, multimedia and multimodal semantics – semantics in data visualization – semantic services for mobile users – supporting tools – applications of semantic-driven approaches These topics are to be understood as speci?cally related to semantic issues. Contributions submitted to the journal and dealing with semantics of data will be considered even if they are not within the topics in the list. While the physical appearance of the journal issues looks like the books from the well-known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. Contributions can be freely submitted by authors and are reviewed by the Editorial Board. Contributions may also be invited, and nevertheless carefully reviewed, as in the case for issues that contain extended versions of best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, focusing on a speci?c topic, are coordinated by guest editors once the proposal for a special issue is accepted by the Editorial Board. Finally, it is also possible that a journal issue be devoted to a single text.

By introducing Semantic Web technologies into geospatial Web services, this book addresses the semantic description of geospatial data and standards-based Web services, discovery of geospatial data and services, and generation of composite services. Semantic descriptions for geospatial data, services, and geoprocessing service chains are structured, organized, and registered in geospatial catalogue services. The ontology-based approach helps to improve the recall and precision of data and services discovery. Semantics-enabled metadata tracking and satisfaction allows analysts to focus on the generation of a geospatial process model rather than spending large amounts of time in data preparation. “DataType”-driven service composition and path planning can help to automate a range of knowledge discovery processes in a limited geospatial domain. Process planning facilitates the construction of complex services and models for geocomputation. A three-phase procedure to cover the lifecycle of service chaining and to identify the roles of the methods involved is proposed. It includes process modeling, process model instantiation, and workflow execution. The approach is implemented in a prototype system with use cases to demonstrate applicability. The objective of the research is to develop the key technologies for an intelligent geospatial knowledge system based on Web services to automate the data discovery and data preprocessing steps in the distributed Web service environment, to automate a range of knowledge discovery processes in a limited geospatial domain, using the automated construction and execution of service chains, and to facilitate the construction of complex services and models for geocomputation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2009, held in Mexico City, Mexico in December 2009. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections foundations on geo-semantics; formal representation of geospatial data; semantics-based information retrieval and recommmender systems; integration of sematics into spatial query processing; and geo-ontologies and applications.

Initiatives, such as INSPIRE and the US DHS Geospatial Data Model, are working to develop a rich set of standards that will create harmonized models and themes for the spatial information infrastructure. However, this is only the first step. Semantically meaningful models must still be developed in order to stimulate interoperability. Creatin