Aneta J. Florczyk

Administrative Units, an Ontological Perspective

The administrative units have been created with the purpose of covering specific territorial and functional scopes over time. Therefore, there are heterogeneity not only among states but also at any level of subdivision. In the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures, administrative units are part of the core data model and they are often exploited in the development of web services. International, cross-border, even national web services may face different and superposed administrative models. The administrative models are complex and they may not be well understood by users and developers in some scenarios, i.e. a query in boundary areas with different administrative models. This paper proposes an ontology that can describe administrative models and also serve as a knowledge base that may facilitate mappings between different types of administrative units.

Discovering geographic web services in search engines

Purpose – There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search), Google and Yahoo! in searching standardised XML documents that describe, identify and locate geographic web services.Design/methodology/approach – The study performed an automated evaluation of three search engines using their application programming interfaces. The queries asked for XML documents describing geographic web services, and documents containing links to those documents. Relevant XML documents linked from the documents found in the search results were also included in the evaluation.Findings – The study reveals that the discovery of geographic web services in search engines does not require the use of...

Exposing CSW catalogues as Linked Data

The OpenGIS Catalogue Services (CS) specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information and related resources in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. The CS specification also defines a HTTP protocol binding, which is called “Catalogue Services for the Web” or CSW. A fair description of CSW is a remote catalogue interface over the HTTP protocol, but not over the architecture of the mainstream Web where search engines are the users’ gateway to information. This paper identifies some aspects of CSW that difficult the findability of metadata in the Web, and hence, the discovery of resources. This paper also presents a toolkit that exposes as Linked Data the content of metadata repositories offered through CSW with the purpose of improving the discovery of metadata records in search engines.

An ontology for the representation of spatiotemporal jurisdictional domains in information retrieval systems

Jurisdictional domains are generally accepted political divisions of the earth surface that cover specific territorial and functional scopes over time. They are frequently used in information retrieval (IR) to classify and locate resources by means of their geographical location. However, the changes they suffer over time reduce their applicability in historical collections. In this context, and with the objective of improving the use of jurisdictional domains, this article proposes an ontology schema that combines in a single model the administrative structure, the spatial components, and the temporal evolution of jurisdictional domains. This ontology schema has been used to create the Spanish jurisdictional model. Additionally, as an example of its applicability in the IR context, the Spanish model has been used as part of a location-based query component for the Spanish Official State Gazette.

Applying Semantic Linkage in the Geospatial Web

The Semantic Web is an attempt to add meaningful annotations to Web resources, services and content that requires developing reference ontologies, which help to understand these annotations. The venue of the Web of Data makes the geographic information, which has become an important part of the current Web, widely usable.

Identifying orthoimages in Web Map Services

Orthoimages are essential in many Web applications to facilitate the background context that helps to understand other georeferenced information. Catalogues and service registries of Spatial Data Infrastructures do not necessarily register all the services providing access to imagery data on the Web, and it is not easy to automatically identify whether the data offered by a Web service are directly imagery data or not. This work presents a method for an automatic detection of the orthoimage layers offered by Web Map Services. The method combines two types of heuristics. The first one consists in analysing the text in the capabilities document. The second type is content-based heuristics, which analyse the content offered by the Web Map Service layers. These heuristics gather and analyse the colour features of a sample collection of image fragments that represent the offered content. An experiment has been performed over a set of Web Map Service layers, which have been fetched from a repository of capabilities documents gathered from the Web. This has proven the efficiency of the method (precision of 87% and recall of 60%). This functionality has been offered as a Web Processing Service, and it has been integrated within the Virtual Spain project to provide a catalogue of orthoimages and build realistic 3D views.

Population of a spatio-temporal knowledge base for jurisdictional domains

Jurisdictional domains are legal divisions of the Earth’s surface frequently used in classification and search systems for location-based queries. However, there are few compilations of jurisdictional domains that include their evolution. One of the causes is the complexity of their generation. As an advance in this area, this paper describes a process that facilitates the creation of knowledge bases containing the evolution of jurisdictional domains. As application example, this paper presents the creation of a jurisdictional knowledge base of Spain with its evolution between 1830 and 2011.

Expeditious management plan towards digital earth

The breakthrough developments in geospatial technologies and the increasing availability of spatial data make geoinformation a business and a decisional element to the management. Hence, it is important to have a management plan to factor in practical and feasible data sources, in building geo applications. The authors of this paper are motivated by the fact that right data sources could outclass in-house resources in various application scenarios. This paper outlines pragmatic cases for the tangible benefits of the existing potential data and expeditious patterns for digital earth. This work also proposes ‘good-enough’ solutions based on the pragmatic cases, available literature, and the 3D city model developed that could be sufficient in contriving the objectives of the common public usage and open business models. To demonstrate this approach, the paper encapsulated the low-cost development of virtual 3D city model using publicly available cadastral data and web services.