A capability matching and ontology reasoning method for high precision OGC web service discovery

Finding the right spatially aware web service in a heterogeneous distributed environment using criteria such as service type, version, time, space, and scale has become a challenge in the integration of geospatial information services. A new method for retrieving Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Service (OWS) that deals with this challenge using page crawling, link detection, service capability matching, and ontology reasoning, is described in this paper. Its major components are distributed OWS, the OWS search engine, the OWS ontology generator, the ontology-based OWS catalog service, and the ontology-based multi-protocol OWS client. Experimental results show that the execution time of this proposed method equals only 0.26 of that of Nutch's method. In addition, the precision is much higher. Moreover, this proposed method can carry out complex OWS reasoning-based queries. It is being used successfully for the Antarctica multi-protocol OWS portal of the Geo-Information Web Service Portal of the Polar.     

An Ontology of the Submarine Relief for Analysis and Representation on Nautical Charts

Abstract

A nautical chart is a kind of map used to describe the seafloor morphology and shoreline of adjacent lands. One of its main purposes is to guarantee safety of navigation. As a consequence, the construction of a nautical chart follows very specific rules. The cartographer has to select and highlight undersea features according to their relevance to navigation. In an automated process, the system must be able to identify and classify these features from the terrain model. This paper aims therefore to define ontologies of the submarine relief and nautical chart that will be at the root of a model-oriented generalization process. To the best of our knowledge, no ontology has been defined to formalize the geographical and cartographic objects for nautical chart representation. Thus, a bottom-up approach was developed to extract and model knowledge derived from standards established by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and cartographers’ expertise. The submarine relief ontology formalizes undersea features describing the submarine relief. Four concepts (composition, morphometric class, shape value and depth value) are introduced to describe properties and relationships between undersea features. The cartographic representation ontology of nautical charts will define several concepts (chart, features, isobathymetric lines and soundings) for the representation of undersea features on the chart.     

The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet

Much of the information stored on the web contains geographical context, but current search engines treat such context in the same way as all other content. In this paper we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a spatially aware search engine which is capable of handling queries in the form of the triplet of ?theme??spatial relationship??location?. The process of identifying geographic references in documents and assigning appropriate footprints to documents, to be stored together with document terms in an appropriate indexing structure allowing real‐time search, is described. Methods allowing users to query and explore results which have been relevance‐ranked in terms of both thematic and spatial relevance have been implanted and a usability study indicates that users are happy with the range of spatial relationships available and intuitively understand how to use such a search engine. Normalised precision for 38 queries, containing four types of spatial relationships, is significantly higher (p<0.001) for searches exploiting spatial information than pure text search.     

Thematic signatures for cleansing and enriching place-related linked data

There has been significant progress transforming semi-structured data about places into knowledge graphs that can be used in a wide variety of geographic information systems such as digital gazetteers or geographic information retrieval systems. For instance, in addition to information about events, actors, and objects, DBpedia contains data about hundreds of thousands of places from Wikipedia and publishes it as Linked Data. Repositories that store data about places are among the most interlinked hubs on the Linked Data cloud. However, most content about places resides in unstructured natural language text, and therefore it is not captured in these knowledge graphs. Instead, place representations are limited to facts such as their population counts, geographic locations, and relations to other entities, for example, headquarters of companies or historical figures. In this paper, we present a novel method to enrich the information stored about places in knowledge graphs using thematic signatures that are derived from unstructured text through the process of topic modeling. As proof of concept, we demonstrate that this enables the automatic categorization of articles into place types defined in the DBpedia ontology (e.g., mountain) and also provides a mechanism to infer relationships between place types that are not captured in existing ontologies. This method can also be used to uncover miscategorized places, which is a common problem arising from the automatic lifting of unstructured and semi-structured data.     

A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration

This paper presents an axiomatic formalization of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical for geographic information processing.

The axiomatic theory is developed using Isabelle, a computational system for implementing logical formalisms. All proofs are computer verified and the computational representation of the theory is available online.     

空间服务语义模式的地理信息服务发现

如何从大规模地理信息服务集合中快速且准确地发现目标服务是地理信息服务应用中的一个关键问题。当前基于关键字的服务发现方式缺乏语义支持,搜索效率低。本文在WSMO/WSML框架下,提出了一种基于空间服务语义模式的服务发现方法,将地理信息从语法模式转换为语义模式,明确表达空间数据中隐含的知识,有效克服数据源之间的语义异构。该方法能够显著提高地理信息服务发现的查全率和查准率。     

虚拟地球在态势感知中的应用

地理信息科学是现代地理学与计算机信息科学之间的一个交叉学科,其主要理论、方法来源于这两门学科。随着地理信息科学自身的发展,＂虚拟地球＂的理念越来越被大家所关注。＂虚拟地球＂以基础地理信息数据为基础,集成了其它各学科的专题数据,大大地拓展了地理信息科学本学科的研究范围,吸引了众多的研究者投入到其中进行各类相关研究,产生大...     

本体在地理知识库构建中的应用

地理知识包括客观地理存在和人们对地理的认知,对地理知识进行有效地组织和管理,实现语义级别的共享和重用,从而充分有效地利用地理知识是一项重要的研究课题。本体作为语义表达和信息共享的重要工具,可以详细描述地理知识的分类分级和语义信息。首先分析了地理知识的分类和本体的作用,然后分析了地理知识的来源,建立了地理本体,并构建了地...     

基于本体的地名信息描述方法

地名信息是基础地理信息的不可或缺的要素,是空间信息的重要载体,地名信息化建设是实现数字地球的基础和前提.文章通过考察地名的语言学、地理学、历史学特征,明确了地名的基本内涵.以此为基础建立地名本体基本框架,并以地名类型为例,分析了地名类型本体的基本语义关系及其表达方法;最后以地名本体为基础提出地名信息描述框架,并以实例说明了基于本体的地名信息描述方法,该方法为地名知识库的建立及应用提供了参考.     

GIS作为新一代地理学语言的特征(英文)

Language plays a vital role in the communication, sharing and transmission of information among human beings. Geographical languages are essential for understanding, investigating, representing and propagating geo-spatial information. Geographical languages have developed and evolved gradually with improvements in science, technology and cognitive levels. Concerning the theoretical progress from geographical information ontology, epistemology and linguistic theory, this paper firstly puts forward the concept of a GIS language and discusses its basic characteristics according to changes in the structures, functions and characteristics of geographical languages. This GIS language can be regarded as a system of synthetic digital symbols. It is a comprehensive representation of geographical objects, phenomena and their spatial distributions and dynamic processes. This representation helps us generate a universal perception of geographical space using geographical scenarios or symbols with geometry, statuses, processes, spatio-temporal relationships, semantics and attributes. Furthermore, this paper states that the GIS language represents a new generation of geographical language due to its intrinsic characteristics, structures, functions and systematic content. Based on the aforementioned theoretical foundation, this paper illustrates the pivotal status and contributions of the GIS language from the perspective of geographical researchers. The language of GIS is a new geographical language designed for the current era, with features including spatio-temporal multi-dimension representation, interactive visualization, virtual geographical scenarios, multi-sensor perception and expedient broadcasting via the web. The GIS language is the highest-level geographical language developed to date, integrating semantic definitions, feature extraction, geographical dynamic representation and spatio-temporal factors and unifying the computation of geographical phenomena and objects. The GIS language possesses five important characteristics: abstraction, systematicness, strictness, precision and hierarchy. In summary, the GIS language provides a new means forpeople to recognize, understand and simulate entire geo-environments. Therefore, exploration of the GIS language’s functions in contemporary geographical developments is becoming increasingly important. Similarly, construction of the conceptual model and scientific systems of the GIS language will promote the development of the disciplines of geography and geographical information sciences. Therefore, this paper investigates the prospects of the GIS language from the perspectives of digital technology, geographical norms, geographical modeling and the disciplinary development of geography.