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GeoSoft: A Language for Soft Querying Features Within GeoJSON Information Layers

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Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2020, WEBIST 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 469))

Abstract

GeoJSON has become one of the most popular format for representing spatial information. Its popularity is due to the fact that it relies on JSON as hosting syntactic structure. Currently, querying in an effective way a GeoJSON document, to extract features of interests, can be hard, for various reasons.

In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language named GeoSoft: it is a high-level tool that hides details of the GeoJSON format, which enables soft querying of features, to express imprecise queries. The paper shows that a GeoSoft query can be effectively and automatically translated into a J-CO-QL script, which is executed by the J-CO Framework, i.e., the execution engine we chose for GeoSoft.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://geojson.org/, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  2. 2.

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/background, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  3. 3.

    MongoDB. 2021. Available online: https://www.mongodb.com/ accessed on 30/10/2021.

  4. 4.

    CouchDb. 2021. Available online: https://couchdb.apache.org/ accessed on 30/10/2021.

  5. 5.

    https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-hub/announcements/welcome-to-the-content-library/ accessed on 30/10/2021.

  6. 6.

    https://leafletjs.com/examples/geojson/, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  7. 7.

    https://carto.com/developers/carto-vl/guides/add-data-sources/, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  8. 8.

    https://turfjs.org/, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  9. 9.

    https://www.statsilk.com/maps/convert-esri-shapefile-map-geojson-format, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  10. 10.

    https://www.geopackage.org/guidance/modeling.html, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  11. 11.

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  12. 12.

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statistical-units/nuts, accessed on 30/10/2021. We opted for the 1:3Million scale since the GeoJSON layer at 1:1Million scale was too big to be stored into a MongoDB database.

  13. 13.

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nama_10r_3popgdp/default/table, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  14. 14.

    https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/NAMA_10_GDP$DEFAULTVIEW/default/ table, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  15. 15.

    for this purpose we used: https://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-json.htm, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  16. 16.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form, accessed on 30/10/2021.

  17. 17.

    https://www.antlr.org/, accessed on 30/10/2021.

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Acknowledgment

We warmly thank Luca Assolari, student of the Master Degree in Computer Science at University of Bergamo (Italy), who implemented the prototype GeoSoft interpreter.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bergamo, DIGIP, Viale Marconi 5, 24044, Dalmine, BG, Italy

    Paolo Fosci & Giuseppe Psaila

  2. Cefriel, Viale Sarca 226, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Stefania Marrara

Authors
  1. Paolo Fosci
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  2. Stefania Marrara
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  3. Giuseppe Psaila
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giuseppe Psaila .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Massimo Marchiori

  2. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Francisco José Domínguez Mayo

  3. Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal/INSTICC, Setubal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

A Syntax of GeoSoft

A Syntax of GeoSoft

In Fig. 7, we present the syntax (grammar) of the GeoSoft language introduced in Sect. 5. The grammar is formulated in EBNFFootnote 16 notation according to the convention applied by ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition)Footnote 17. ANTLR is a widely-known parser generator that denotes non-terminal elements (rules) in lower case, while terminal elements (tokens) are in upper case or directly declared between quotes. The geoSoft rule is the starting rule of the grammar.

Fig. 7.
figure 7

GeoSoft grammar.

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For the sake of simplicity, we do not include the definitions of the condition, expression and number rules, but their meaning is denoted by their names. The ID and DOT_ID tokens denote the classic identifiers, respectively, not having (ID) or having (DOT_ID) a dot character as starting character.

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Fosci, P., Marrara, S., Psaila, G. (2023). GeoSoft: A Language for Soft Querying Features Within GeoJSON Information Layers. In: Marchiori, M., Domínguez Mayo, F.J., Filipe, J. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST WEBIST 2020 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 469. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24197-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24197-0_11

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