Alexandru Stan

High-level geospatial information discovery and fusion for geocoded multimedia

Purpose– Improvements and portability of technologies and smart devices have enabled a rapid growth in the amount of user-generated media such as photographs and videos. Whilst various media generation and management systems exist, it still remains a challenge to discover the right information, for the right purpose. This paper aims to propose an approach to reverse geocoding by cross-referencing multiple geospatial data sources to enable the enrichment of media and therefore enable better organisation and searching of the media to create an overall picture about places.Design/methodology/approach– The paper presents a system architecture that incorporates the proposed approach to aggregate several geospatial databases to enrich geo-tagged media with human readable information, which will further enable the goal of creating an overall picture about places. The approach enables the semantic information relating to point of interest.Findings– Implementation of the proposed approach shows that a single geospatial data source does not contain enough information to accurately describe the high-level geospatial information for geocoded multimedia. However, fusing several geospatial data sources together enables richer, more accurate high-level geospatial information to be tagged to the geocoded multimedia.Originality/value– The contribution in this paper shows that high-level geospatial information can be retrieved from many data sources and fused together to enrich geocoded multimedia which can facilitate better searching and retrieval of the multimedia.

Privacy-by-Norms Privacy Expectations in Online Interactions

In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it personal, and nearly all of it valuable. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. This position paper proposes a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, whereby data collection and data protection norms are configured by the users themselves, using a collaborative participatory process of argumentation. This refers to the ability of users to understand privacy-related documents and their implications via participatory processes, wisdom-of-the-crowds approaches and visual cues. By strengthening the trust bond between service developers and users, the transformative impact of this solution, called Privacy-by-Norms (Pb Norms), will be to encourage innovation and to ensure that (big) datas (tiny) generators are also its beneficiaries. Pb Norms will aim to complement existing top-down solutions to data protection that rely on technical or legal provisions. The goal is to enable citizens to express their privacy expectations through the use of mature ICT technologies from the fields of Computational Argumentation and the Semantic Web.

A Geospatial Semantic Enrichment and Query Service for Geotagged Photographs

With the increasing abundance of technologies and smart devices, equipped with a multitude of sensors for sensing the environment around them, information creation and consumption has now become effortless. This, in particular, is the case for photographs with vast amounts being created and shared every day. For example, at the time of this writing, Instagram users upload 70 million photographs a day. Nevertheless, it still remains a challenge to discover the “right” information for the appropriate purpose. This paper describes an approach to create semantic geospatial metadata for photographs, which can facilitate photograph search and discovery. To achieve this we have developed and implemented a semantic geospatial data model by which a photograph can be enrich with geospatial metadata extracted from several geospatial data sources based on the raw low-level geo-metadata from a smartphone photograph. We present the details of our method and implementation for searching and querying the semantic geospatial metadata repository to enable a user or third party system to find the information they are looking for.

A Service for Semantic Enrichment of Smartphone Photographs

This paper describes an approach to model data extracted from several geospatial data sources based on the geo-metadata from a smartphone photograph. The model enables the geospatial data sources to be cross referenced and inferences made about the relationships between the data and the photograph. The service provided by our system takes a photograph and generates semantic geospatial enrichments that can be annotated to the photograph.

A flexible environment for multimedia management and publishing

In this paper, we describe the IM3I system, which provides a flexible approach to managing and publishing collections of images and videos. The system is based on web services that allow automatic and manual annotation, retrieval, browsing and authoring of multimedia. Results of user evaluations, performed by professional archivists and archive managers on a real-world system deployment have confirmed that the system is easy to be used and delivers a complete set of functionalities.

Towards a Collective Awareness Platform for Privacy Concerns and Expectations

In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it being valuable and a significant part of it being personal. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. This paper proposes CAPrice, a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, whereby data collection and use by digital products are driven by the expectations and needs of the consumers themselves, through a collaborative participatory process and the configuration of collective privacy norms. The proposed solution relies on a new innovation model that complements existing top-down approaches to data protection, which mainly rely on technical or legal provisions. Ultimately, the CAPrice ecosystem will strengthen the trust bond between service developers and users, encouraging innovation and empowering the individuals to promote their privacy expectations as a quantifiable, community-generated request.