Agustina Buccella

Ontology-driven geographic information integration: A survey of current approaches

Integrating different information sources is a growing research area within different application domains. This is particularly true for the geographic information domain which is facing new challenges because newer and better technologies are capturing large amounts of information about the Earth. This trend can be combined with increases in the distribution of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) on the Web, which is leading to the proliferation of different geospatial information repositories and the subsequent need to integrate information across repositories to get consistent information. To overcome this situation, many proposals use ontologies in the integration process. In this paper we analyze and compare the most widely referred proposals of geographic information integration, focusing on those using ontologies as semantic tools to represent the sources, and to facilitate the integration process.

Towards systematic software reuse of GIS: Insights from a case study

With the development and adoption of geographic information systems, there is an increasingly amount of software resources being stored or recorded as products to be reused. At the same time, complexity of geographic services is addressed through standardization, which allows developers reaching higher quality levels. In this paper, we introduce our domain-oriented approach to developing geographic software product lines focusing on the experiences collected from a case study. It was developed in the Marine Ecology Domain (Patagonia, Argentina) and illustrates insights of the process.

Building a global normalized ontology for integrating geographic data sources

Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integration. However, an integration process is not as simple as joining several systems, since any effort at information sharing runs into the problem of semantic heterogeneity, which requires the identification and representation of all semantics useful in performing schema integration. On several research lines, including research on geographic information system integration, ontologies have been introduced to facilitate knowledge sharing among various agents. Particularly, one of the aspects of ontology sharing is performing some sort of mapping between ontology constructs. Further, some research suggests that we should also be able to combine ontologies where the product of this combination will be, at the very least, the intersection of the two given ontologies. However, few approaches built integrations upon standard and normalized information, which might improve accuracy of mappings and therefore commitment and understandability of the integration. In this work, we propose a novel system (called GeoMergeP) to integrate geographic sources by formalizing their information as normalized ontologies. Our integral merging process-including structural, syntactic and semantic aspects-assists users in finding the more suitable correspondences. The system has been empirically tested in the context of projects of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA, ex APAT), providing a consistent and complete integration of their sources.

Marine ecology service reuse through taxonomy-oriented SPL development

Nowadays, reusing software applications encourages researchers and industrials to collaborate in order to increase software quality and to reduce software development costs. However, effective reuse is not easy and only a limited portion of reusable models actually offers effective evidence regarding their appropriateness, usability and/or effectiveness. Focusing reuse on a particular domain, such as marine ecology, allows us to narrow the scope; and along with a systematic approach such as software product line development, helps us to potentially improving reuse. From our experiences developing a subdomain-oriented software product line (SPL for the marine ecology subdomain), in this paper we describe semantic resources created for assisting this development and thus promoting systematic software reuse. The main contributions of our work are focused on the definition of a standard conceptual model for marine ecology applications together with a set of services and guides which assist the process of product derivation. The services are structured in a service taxonomy (as a specialization of the ISO 19119 std) in which we create a new set of categories and services built over a conceptual model for marine ecology applications. We also define and exemplify a set of guides for composing the services of the taxonomy in order to fulfill different functionalities of particular systems in the subdomain. HighlightsSolutions for software reuse for GIS domains by using standard information.Domain-specific taxonomy for supporting the generation of software artifacts.Guides for using geographic services in order to fulfill different GIS functionalities of systems in the domain.Evaluation of the effectiveness of the taxonomy and guides when building an SPL and two derived products.Improvements on time and costs of new GIS products being developed.

GeoMergeP: Geographic Information Integration through Enriched Ontology Matching

The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the Internet, to enable new ways of working, with the enhanced provision of information and interactive services accessible over different channels, is the foundation of a new family of information systems. Particularly, this information explosion on the Web, which threatens our ability to manage information, has affected the geographic information systems. Interoperability is a key word here, since it means, an increasing level of cooperation between information sources on national, regional and local levels; and requires new methods to develop interoperable geographic systems. In this paper, an ontology-driven system (GeoMergeP) is described for the semantic integration of geographic information sources. Particularly, we focus on how ontology matching can be enriched through the use of standards for implementing a semi-automatic matching approach. Then, the requirements and steps of the system are illustrated on the ISPRA (Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) case study. Our preliminary results show that ontology matching can be improved; helping interoperating systems increase reliability of exchanged and shared information.

Towards Integration of Geographic Information Systems

Nowadays, geographic information is increasingly used by several entities around the world. Then, the need of sharing information from different sources is an obvious consequence from such proliferation of systems. Unfortunately, integrating geographic information is not a trivial issue. We must deal with several heterogeneity problems, which increase complexity of integration approaches. In order to alleviate some problems, we introduce an integration process based on two main sets of tasks - non-logic and logic. The former is aimed at finding similarities based on structural and syntactic analyzes of geographic data; and the latter is used to calculate inferences from semantics of data by using ontologies. We illustrate the approach by integrating information from two governmental entities, which manage geographic information of North Patagonia, Argentina.

Reusing Geographic E-Services: A Case Study in the Marine Ecological Domain

Software product line engineering aims to reduce development time, effort, cost, and complexity by taking advantage of the commonality within a portfolio of similar products. This may benefit the development of applications in several domains, and particularly in geographic information systems (GIS). Reusing services for GIS challenges developers to produce assets highly adaptable to various service clients and contexts. For that, service variability must carefully be modeled by considering different recommendations such as well-established standards. This paper presents an approach that facilitates variability implementation, management and tracing by integrating product-line and GIS development. Features are separated following standard recommendations and composed on a platform-oriented framework. The presented concepts are illustrated with a case study of a marine ecological system.

A three-level approach to ontology merging

Ontology merging is the process of creating a new ontology from two or more existing ontologies with overlapping parts. Currently, there are many domain areas in Computer Science interested in this topic. Federated Databases and Semantic Web are some of them. In this paper we introduce a three level approach that provides a semi-automatic method to ontology merging. It performs some tasks automatically and guides the user in performing other tasks for which his intervention is required.

SeVaTax: service taxonomy selection & validation process for SPL development

Variability management is a key activity in Software Product Lines (SPL) development. To be more specific, the product selection and verification allow us to generate correct derivations. In this work we present a process, called SeVaTax, to guide the selection and validation activities -both in domain and application engineering- together with a supporting tool.

A Domain-Oriented Approach for GIS Component Selection

So far, one of the key non-solved aspects of component-based developments is identifying and recovering existing components in effective way. On these lines, we all agree on the needs of organizing and cataloging candidate components to speed up search and identification. Particularly, domain-oriented catalogues have emerged as promissory tools, although it also implies more complex procedures for their creation. In this context, this paper introduces a proposal to compile information for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) along with a standardized information scheme, we extract and catalogue information from components on the Web as well as from requirements from components’ users. We describe the main elements of the process and we illustrate them by using a motivating example.