Abstract
Geospatial semantics as a research field studies how to publish, retrieve, reuse, and integrate geo-data, how to describe geo-data by conceptual models, and how to develop formal specifications on top of data structures to reduce the risk of incompatibilities. Geo-data is highly heterogeneous and ranges from qualitative interviews and thematic maps to satellite imagery and complex simulations. This makes ontologies, semantic annotations, and reasoning support essential ingredients towards a Geospatial Semantic Web. In this paper, we present an overview of major research questions, recent findings, and core literature.
Keywords
- Geographic Information System
- Semantic Similarity
- Spatial Reasoning
- Voluntary Geographic Information
- Spatial Data Infrastructure
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abdelmoty, A.I., Smart, P., Jones, C.B.: Building place ontologies for the semantic web: Issues and approaches. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval, GIR 2007, pp. 7–12. ACM, New York (2007)
Adams, B., Janowicz, K.: Constructing geo-ontologies by reification of observation data. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, GIS 2011, pp. 309–318. ACM, New York (2011)
Agouris, P., Stefanidis, A.: Efficient summarization of spatiotemporal events. Commun. ACM 46(1), 65–66 (2003)
Ahlqvist, O., Shortridge, A.: Characterizing land cover structure with semantic variograms. In: Riedl, A., Kainz, W., Elmes, G. (eds.) Progress in Spatial Data Handling -12th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, pp. 401–415 (Springer 2006)
Alazzawi, A., Abdelmoty, A., Jones, C.: What can I do there? Towards the automatic discovery of place-related services and activities. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 26(2), 345–364 (2012)
Barsalou, L.: Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes 5(6), 513–562 (2003)
Bateman, J.: Towards a generic foundation for spatial ontology. In: Varzi, A., Vieu, L. (eds.) Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2004), pp. 237–248. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2004)
Battle, R., Kolas, D.: Enabling the Geospatial Semantic Web with Parliament and GeoSPARQL. Semantic Web Journal 3(4) (2012)
Beard, K.: Modeling change in space and time: An event based approach. In: Billen, R., Joao, E., Forrest, D. (eds.) Dynamic and Mobile GIS: Investigating Changes in Space and Time, pp. 55–74. CRC Press (2007)
Bennett, B., Mallenby, D., Third, A.: An ontology for grounding vague geographic terms. In: Eschenbach, C., Gruninger, M. (eds.) Proc. 5th Intern. Conf. on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, pp. 280–293. IOS-Press [u.a.], Saarbrücken (2008)
Bennett, B.: Spatial vagueness. In: Jeansoulin, R., Papini, O., Prade, H., Schockaert, S. (eds.) Methods for Handling Imperfect Spatial Information. STUDFUZZ, vol. 256, pp. 15–47. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Bittner, T., Donnelly, M., Smith, B.: A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 23(6), 765–798 (2009)
Brodaric, B., Gahegan, M.: Experiments to examine the situated nature of geoscientific concepts. Spatial Cognition & Computation 7(1), 61–95 (2007)
Buckley, L.B., Jetz, W.: Linking global turnover of species and environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(46), 17836–17841 (2008)
Burrough, P., Frank, A.U. (eds.): Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries. Taylor and Francis (1996)
Carral, D., Scheider, S., Janowicz, K., Vardeman, C., Krisnadhi, A.A., Hitzler, P.: An ontology design pattern for cartographic map scaling. In: Cimiano, P., Corcho, O., Presutti, V., Hollink, L., Rudolph, S. (eds.) ESWC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7882, pp. 76–93. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Chrisman, N.: Exploring geographic information systems. Wiley (2001)
Christakos, G., Bogaert, P., Serre, M.: Temporal GIS: Advanced Functions for Field-Based Applications. Springer (2002)
Cohn, A.G., Hazarika, S.M.: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: an overview. Fundamenta Informaticae 46, 1–29 (2001)
Compton, M., Barnaghi, P.M., Bermudez, L., Garcia-Castro, R., Corcho, Ó., Cox, S., Graybeal, J., Hauswirth, M., Henson, C.A., Herzog, A., Huang, V.A., Janowicz, K., Kelsey, W.D., Phuoc, D.L., Lefort, L., Leggieri, M., Neuhaus, H., Nikolov, A., Page, K.R., Passant, A., Sheth, A.P., Taylor, K.: The ssn ontology of the w3c semantic sensor network incubator group. Journal of Web Semantics 17, 25–32 (2012)
Couclelis, H.: Ontologies of geographic information. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 24(12), 1785–1809 (2010)
Cruz, I., Sunna, W.: Structural alignment methods with applications to geospatial ontologies. Transactions in GIS, special issue on Semantic Similarity Measurement and Geospatial Applications 12(6), 683–711 (2008)
Devaraju, A.: Representing and reasoning about geographic occurrences in the sensor web. Ph.D. thesis, University of Münster (2012)
Dou, D., McDermott, D.V., Qi, P.: Ontology translation on the semantic web. Journal of Data Semantics 2, 35–57 (2005)
Egenhofer, M.J., Mark, D.M.: Naive geography. In: Kuhn, W., Frank, A.U. (eds.) COSIT 1995. LNCS, vol. 988, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)
Elands, B., Wiersum, K.F.: Forestry and rural development in europe: an exploration of socio-political discourses. Forest Policy and Economics 3(1), 5–16 (2001)
Fensel, D., Bussler, C.: The Web Service Modeling Framework WSMF. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 1(2), 113–137 (2002)
Fonseca, F., Egenhofer, M., Davis, C., Câmara, G.: Semantic granularity in ontology-driven geographic information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 36(1-2), 121–151 (2002)
Fox, P., McGuinness, D., Raskin, R., Sinha, K.: A volcano erupts: semantically mediated integration of heterogeneous volcanic and atmospheric data. In: Proceedings of the ACM First Workshop on CyberInfrastructure: Information Management in eScience, CIMS 2007, pp. 1–6. ACM (2007)
Frank, A.U.: Chapter 2: Ontology for spatio-temporal databases. In: Sellis, T.K., et al. (eds.) Spatio-Temporal Databases. LNCS, vol. 2520, pp. 9–77. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Galton, A., Mizoguchi, R.: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events. Applied Ontology 4(2), 71–107 (2009)
Gangemi, A., Presutti, V.: Towards a pattern science for the semantic web. Semantic Web 1(1-2), 61–68 (2010)
Goodchild, M.: Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69(4), 211–221 (2007)
Goodchild, M.: Formalizing place in geographic information systems. In: Burton, L., et al. (eds.) Communities, Neighborhoods, and Health: Expanding the Boundaries of Place, vol. 1, pp. 21–34. Springer, Berlin (2011)
Goodwin, J., Dolbear, C., Hart, G.: Geographical linked data: The administrative geography of great britain on the semantic web. Transactions in GIS 12, 19–30 (2008)
van Hage, W., Malaise, V., Segers, R., Hollink, L., Schreiber, G.: Design and use of the Simple Event Model (SEM). Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 9(2) (2011)
Halpin, H., Hayes, P.J., McCusker, J.P., McGuinness, D.L., Thompson, H.S.: When owl: sameas isn’t the same: An analysis of identity in linked data. In: Patel-Schneider, P.F., Pan, Y., Hitzler, P., Mika, P., Zhang, L., Pan, J.Z., Horrocks, I., Glimm, B. (eds.) ISWC 2010, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6496, pp. 305–320. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Halpin, H., Presutti, V.: The identity of resources on the web: An ontology for web architecture. Applied Ontology 6(3), 263–293 (2011)
Harvey, F., Kuhn, W., Pundt, H., Bishr, Y., Riedemann, C.: Semantic interoperability: A central issue for sharing geographic information. The Annals of Regional Science 2(33), 213–232 (1999)
Hill, L.: Georeferencing. The geographic associations of information. MIT Press, Cambridge (2006)
Hitzler, P., van Harmelen, F.: A reasonable semantic web. Semantic Web 1(1-2), 39–44 (2010)
Hitzler, P., Krötzsch, M., Rudolph, S.: Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies. Chapman & Hall/CRC (2009)
Hollenstein, L., Purves, R.: Exploring place through user-generated content: Using flickr tags to describe city cores. J. Spatial Information Science, 21–48 (2010)
Janowicz, K., Hitzler, P.: The digital earth as knowledge engine. Semantic Web Journal 3(3) (2012)
Janowicz, K., Raubal, M., Kuhn, W.: The semantics of similarity in geographic information retrieval. Journal of Spatial Information Science (2), 29–57 (2011)
Janowicz, K., Schade, S., Bröring, A., Keßler, C., Maue, P., Stasch, C.: Semantic enablement for spatial data infrastructures. Transactions in GIS 14(2), 111–129 (2010)
Janowicz, K.: Observation-driven geo-ontology engineering. Transaction in GIS 16(3), 351–374 (2012)
Janowicz, K., Scheider, S., Pehle, T., Hart, G.: Geospatial semantics and linked spatiotemporal data - past, present, and future. Semantic Web 3(4), 321–332 (2012)
Jones, C.B., Abdelmoty, A.I., Finch, D., Fu, G., Vaid, S.: The spirit spatial search engine: Architecture, ontologies and spatial indexing. In: Egenhofer, M., Freksa, C., Miller, H.J. (eds.) GIScience 2004. LNCS, vol. 3234, pp. 125–139. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Jones, C.B., Alani, H., Tudhope, D.: Geographical information retrieval with ontologies of place. In: Montello, D.R. (ed.) COSIT 2001. LNCS, vol. 2205, pp. 322–335. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Jordan, T., Raubal, M., Gartrell, B., Egenhofer, M.J.: An Affordance-Based Model of Place in GIS. In: Poiker, T., Chrisman, N. (eds.) 8th Int. Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH 1998), pp. 98–109. IUG, Vancouver (1998)
Kauppinen, T., de Espindola, G.M., Jones, J., Sánchez, A., Gräler, B., Bartoschek, T.: Linked brazilian amazon rainforest data. Semantic Web Journal (forthcoming, 2013)
Kauppinen, T., Hyvönen, E.: Modeling and Reasoning about Changes in Ontology Time Series, pp. 319–338. Springer, New York (2007)
Kavouras, M., Kokla, M.: Theories of Geographic Concepts: Ontological Approaches to Semantic Integration. Taylor & Francis (2007)
Keßler, C.: What is the difference? A cognitive dissimilarity measure for information retrieval result sets. Knowl. Inf. Syst. 30(2), 319–340 (2012)
Klien, E.: A rule-based strategy for the semantic annotation of geodata. Transactions in GIS 11(3), 437–452 (2007)
Koubarakis, M., Kyzirakos, K., Karpathiotakis, M., Nikolaou, C., Sioutis, M., Vassos, S., Michail, D., Herekakis, T., Kontoes, C., Papoutsis, I.: Challenges for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning in Linked Geospatial Data. In: IJCAI 2011 Workshop on Benchmarks and Applications of Spatial Reasoning (BASR 2011), pp. 33–38 (2011)
Kuhn, W.: Semantic reference systems (guest editorial). International Journal of Geographical Information Science 17(5), 405–409 (2003)
Kuhn, W.: Geospatial semantics: Why, of what, and how? In: Spaccapietra, S., Zimányi, E. (eds.) Journal on Data Semantics III. LNCS, vol. 3534, pp. 1–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Kuhn, W.: Semantic engineering. In: Navratil, G. (ed.) Research Trends in Geographic Information Science. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, vol. 12, pp. 63–76. Springer, Berlin (2009)
Kuhn, W.: Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 26(12), 2267–2276 (2012)
Kuhn, W.: Modeling vs encoding for the semantic web. Semantic Web Journal 1(1-2) (2010)
Lemmens, R., Wytzisk, A., de By, R., Granell, C., Gould, M., van Oosterom, P.: Integrating semantic and syntactic descriptions to chain geographic services. IEEE Internet Computing 10(5), 42–52 (2006)
Li, B., Fonseca, F.: TDD - A Comprehensive Model for Qualitative Spatial Similarity Assessment. Spatial Cognition and Computation 6(1), 31–62 (2006)
Llaves, A., Michels, H., Maue, P., Roth, M.: Semantic event processing in envision. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS 2012), pp. 29:1–29:2. ACM, New York (2012) (forthcoming)
Lund, G.: Definitions of forest, deforestation, afforestation, and reforestation. Tech. rep. (2012), gainesville, va: Forest information services, available from the world wide web: http://home.comcast.net/~gyde/DEFpaper.htm
Lutz, M.: Ontology-based descriptions for semantic discovery and composition of geoprocessing services. GeoInformatica 11, 1–36 (2007)
Lutz, M., Klien, E.: Ontology-based retrieval of geographic information. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 20(3), 233–260 (2006)
Mäkelä, E., Hyvönen, E., Ruotsalo, T.: How to deal with massively heterogeneous cultural heritage data - lessons learned in culturesampo. Semantic Web 3(1), 85–109 (2012)
Mark, D.M., Smith, B., Egenhofer, M., Stephen Hirtle, S.C.: Ontological foundations for geographic information science. In: McMaster, R., Usery, L. (eds.) Research Challenges in Geographic Information Science, pp. 335–350. CRC Press (2004)
Martin, D., Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., Mcdermott, D., Mcilraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Parsia, B., Payne, T., Sirin, E., Srinivasan, N., Sycara, K.: Owl-s: Semantic markup for web services (November 2004), http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-OWL-S-20041122/
Maue, P., Michels, H., Roth, M.: Injecting semantic annotations into (geospatial) web service descriptions. Semantic Web Journal 3(4) (2012)
Mitchell, S.A.: Heights of the principal mountains in the world (1846), http://www.davidrumsey.com
Montello, D., Goodchild, M., Gottsegen, J., Fohl, P.: Where’s downtown? Behavioral methods for determining referents of vague spatial queries. Spatial Cognition & Computation 2(3), 185–204 (2003)
NASA: A.40 computational modeling algorithms and cyberinfrastructure (December 19, 2011). Tech. rep., National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (2012)
Nedas, K., Egenhofer, M.: Spatial-scene similarity queries. Transactions in GIS 12(6), 661–681 (2008)
Noy, N.: Semantic integration: a survey of ontology-based approaches. SIGMOD Rec. 33, 65–70 (2004)
Probst, F., Lutz, M.: Giving Meaning to GI Web Service Descriptions. In: International Workshop on Web Services: Modeling, Architecture and Infrastructure (WSMAI 2004) (2004)
Probst, F.: Observations, measurements and semantic reference spaces. Appl. Ontol. 3(1-2), 63–89 (2008)
Raskin, R., Pan, M.: Knowledge representation in the semantic web for earth and environmental terminology (sweet). Computers & Geosciences 31(9), 1119–1125 (2005)
Raubal, M.: Formalizing conceptual spaces. In: Varzi, A., Vieu, L. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2004). Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 114, pp. 153–164. IOS Press, Torino (2004)
Renz, J., Nebel, B.: Qualitative spatial reasoning using constraint calculi. In: Aiello, M., Pratt-Hartmann, I., van Benthem, J. (eds.) Handbook of Spatial Logics, pp. 161–215. Springer (2007)
Rodríguez, A., Egenhofer, M.: Comparing geospatial entity classes: an asymmetric and context-dependent similarity measure. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 18(3), 229–256 (2004)
Schade, S.: Ontology-driven translation of geospatial data. Ph.D. thesis (2010)
Scheider, S., Kuhn, W.: Affordance-based categorization of road network data using a grounded theory of channel networks. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 24(8), 1249–1267 (2010)
Scheider, S.: Grounding Geographic Information in Perceptual Operations. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 244. IOS Press (2012)
Schlieder, C.: Digital heritage: Semantic challenges of long-term preservation. Semantic Web 1(1-2), 143–147 (2010)
Schwering, A., Raubal, M.: Measuring semantic similarity between geospatial conceptual regions. In: Rodríguez, M.A., Cruz, I., Levashkin, S., Egenhofer, M.J. (eds.) GeoS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3799, pp. 90–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Simon, R., Sadilek, C., Korb, J., Baldauf, M., Haslhofer, B.: Tag clouds and old maps: Annotations as linked spatiotemporal data in the cultural heritage domain. In: Workshop On Linked Spatiotemporal Data 2010, held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2010), vol. 691. CEUR-WS, Zurich, Switzerland (2010)
Smith, B., Mark, D.M.: Ontology and geographic kinds. In: Proceedings International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vancouver, Canada, July 12-15 (1998)
Stadler, C., Lehmann, J., Höffner, K.: LinkedGeoData: A core for a web of spatial open data
Stocker, M., Sirin, E.: PelletSpatial: A Hybrid RCC-8 and RDF/OWL Reasoning and Query Engine. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on OWL: Experiences and Directions (OWLED) (2009)
Szekely, P., Knoblock, C.A., Gupta, S., Taheriyan, M., Wu, B.: Exploiting semantics of web services for geospatial data fusion. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Semantics and Ontologies, SSO 2011, pp. 32–39. ACM (2011)
Tuan, Y.: Space and place: humanistic perspective. Theory and decision library. D. Reidel Pub. Co. (1979)
Usery, E.L., Varanka, D.: Design and development of linked data from the national map. Semantic Web Journal 3(4) (2012)
Vaccari, L., Shvaiko, P., Marchese, M.: A geo-service semantic integration in Spatial Data Infrastructures. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research 4 (2009), http://ijsdir.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php/ijsdir/article/viewFile/107/113
Wessel, M., Möller, R.: Flexible software architectures for ontology-based information systems. Journal of Applied Logic 7(1), 75–99 (2009)
Ying, J.J.C., Lee, W.C., Weng, T.C., Tseng, V.S.: Semantic trajectory mining for location prediction. In: Cruz, I.F., Agrawal, D., Jensen, C.S., Ofek, E., Tanin, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM-GIS 2011, pp. 34–43. ACM (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Janowicz, K., Scheider, S., Adams, B. (2013). A Geo-semantics Flyby. In: Rudolph, S., Gottlob, G., Horrocks, I., van Harmelen, F. (eds) Reasoning Web. Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Data Access. Reasoning Web 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39784-4_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39784-4_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39783-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39784-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)