Interpretation and automatic integration of geospatial data into the Semantic Web

Towards a process of automatic geospatial data interpretation, classification and integration using semantic technologies

Computing volume 102, pages365–391(2020)Cite this article

Abstract

In the context of disaster management, geospatial information plays a crucial role in the decision-making process to protect and save the population. Gathering a maximum of information from different sources to oversee the current situation is a complex task due to the diversity of data formats and structures. Although several approaches have been designed to integrate data from different sources into an ontology, they mainly require background knowledge of the data. However, non-standard data set schema (NSDS) of relational geospatial data retrieved from e.g. web feature services are not always documented. This lack of background knowledge is a major challenge for automatic semantic data integration. Focusing on this problem, this article presents an automatic approach for geospatial data integration in NSDS. This approach does a schema mapping according to the result of an ontology matching corresponding to a semantic interpretation process. This process is based on geocoding and natural language processing. This article extends work done in a previous publication by an improved unit detection algorithm, data quality and provenance enrichments, the detection of feature clusters. It also presents an improved evaluation process to better assess the performance of this approach compared to a manually created ontology. These experiments have shown the automatic approach obtains an error of semantic interpretation around 10% according to a manual approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://code.google.com/p/google-api-translate-java.

  2. 2.

    http://i3mainz.hs-mainz.de/de/projekte/semanticgis.

  3. 3.

    https://offenedaten-koeln.de Open data portal of Cologne to retrieve data that we have converted in shapefiles.

  4. 4.

    http://geoportal.saarland.de/arcgis/services/Internet/Gesundheit/MapServer/WFSServer Web service allowing for retrieving data from Saarland that we have converted in shapefiles.

  5. 5.

    A non-expert is someone who knows about Semantic Web technologies but does not know the context and the goal of the data set.

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Acknowledgements

We are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (https://www.bmbf.de/en/index.html Project Reference: 03FH032IX4).

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Affiliations

  1. Mainz University of Applied Sciences, Lucy-Hillebrand-Str. 2, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    Claire Prudhomme, Timo Homburg, Jean-Jacques Ponciano & Frank Boochs

  2. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Bourgogne (LIB) - EA 7534, University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Bâtiment i3M rue Sully, 21000, Dijon, France

    Christophe Cruz & Ana-Maria Roxin

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  1. Claire Prudhomme
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Prudhomme, C., Homburg, T., Ponciano, JJ. et al. Interpretation and automatic integration of geospatial data into the Semantic Web. Computing 102, 365–391 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-019-00701-y

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Keywords

  • Semantic interpretation
  • Data quality
  • Natural language processing
  • Ontologies
  • Spatial fusion
  • Semantic Web