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Consistency assessment for open geodata integration: an ontology-based approach

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Abstract

Integrating heterogeneous geospatial data sources is important in various domains like smart cities, urban planning and governance, but remains a challenging research problem. In particular, the production of high-quality integrated data from multiple sources requires an understanding of their respective characteristics and a systematic assessment of the consistency within and between the data sources. In order to perform the assessment, the data has to be placed on a common ground. However, in practice, heterogeneous geodata are often provided in diverse formats and organized in significantly different structures. In this work, we propose a framework that uses an ontology-based approach to overcome the heterogeneity by means of a domain ontology, so that consistency rules can be evaluated at the unified ontological representation of the data sources. In our case study, we use open governmental data from Open Data Portals (ODPs) and volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as two test data sources in the area of the province of South Tyrol, Italy. Our preliminary experiment shows that the approach is effective in detecting inconsistencies within and between ODP and OSM data. These findings provide valuable insights for a better combined usage of these datasets.

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Notes

  1. https://data.gov.au/dataset/data-gov-au-dataset-ontology

  2. https://github.com/italia/daf-ontologie-vocabolari-controllati

  3. http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/linked-data

  4. http://daten.buergernetz.bz.it/de/

  5. http://www.openstreetmap.org

  6. http://geokatalog.buergernetz.bz.it/geokatalog

  7. https://www.geofabrik.de/

  8. https://openlayers.org/

  9. http://visjs.org

  10. http://datiopen.istat.it/ontologie.php?language=eng

  11. http://www.geonames.org/ontology/documentation.html

  12. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/

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Acknowledgements

This research has been partially supported by the EU H2020 project INODE, by the Italian PRIN project HOPE, by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Investment for Growth and Jobs Programme 2014-2020 through the project IDEE (FESR1133), by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano through the projects QUADRO, KGID, and GeoVKG, by the Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute (JITRI), and by the Changshu Fengfan Power Equipment Co., Ltd.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KRDB Research Centre, Faculty of Computer Science, Free-University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, 39100, Italy

    Linfang Ding, Guohui Xiao & Diego Calvanese

  2. Chair of Cartography, Technical University of Munich, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Linfang Ding & Liqiu Meng

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  1. Linfang Ding
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  2. Guohui Xiao
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Correspondence to Guohui Xiao.

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Ding, L., Xiao, G., Calvanese, D. et al. Consistency assessment for open geodata integration: an ontology-based approach. Geoinformatica 25, 733–758 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-019-00384-9

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