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Publishing deep web geographic data

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Abstract

This article introduces a design process, called W-RayS, to describe Deep Web geographic data and to publish the descriptions both on the Web of Data and on the Surface Web. The article also outlines a toolkit that supports the process and discusses an experiment in which the toolkit was used to publish data stored in a large map server. Briefly, to describe geographic data in vector format, the designer should first specify views over the underlying geographic database that capture the basic characteristics of the geographic objects and their topological relationships represented in the vector data. The same idea is applied to raster data, but using a gazetteer or any other geographic database that covers the same area as the raster data. Then, the designer should map the view definitions to an RDF schema, following the Linked Data principles. The descriptions of the geographic data are therefore formalized as sets of RDF triples synthesized from the conventional data. To publish geographic data descriptions on the Web of Data, the designer may decide to materialize the RDF triples and store them in a repository or create a SPARQL endpoint to access the triples on demand. To publish geographic data descriptions on the Surface Web, W-RayS offers the designer tools to transform the RDF triples to natural language sentences, organized as static Web pages with embedded RDFa. The inclusion of RDFa preserves the structure of the data and allows more specific queries, processed by engines that analyze Web pages with RDFa.

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Notes

  1. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data

  2. www.inf.puc-rio.br/~hpiccinini/

  3. A Part-of-Speech Tagger marks (“tags”) a word in a text (within a corpus) with its corresponding part of speech, based on its definition and its relationship with adjacent and related words or phrases in a clause or paragraph. Part-of-speech is a linguistic category of words or lexical items that is usually defined by the syntactic or morphologic behavior of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include nouns and verbs.

  4. http://mapas.ibge.gov.br

  5. The definition of the RDF schema is available at www.inf.puc-rio.br/~hpiccinini/wray/biome.owl

  6. The complete RDF schema is available at www.inf.puc-rio.br/~hpiccinini/wray/image.owl

  7. http://mapas.ibge.gov.br

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by IBGE, for H. Piccinini, and by CNPq under grants 301497/2006-0, 475717/2011-2, and CAPES/PROCAD NF 21/2009, for M.A. Casanova and A.L. Furtado.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Helena Piccinini, Marco A. Casanova & Antonio L. Furtado

  2. Departamento de Informática, IBGE, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Helena Piccinini

  3. Instituto de Computação, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, RJ, Brazil

    Luiz André P. P. Leme

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  1. Helena Piccinini
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  2. Marco A. Casanova
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  3. Luiz André P. P. Leme
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  4. Antonio L. Furtado
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Correspondence to Marco A. Casanova.

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Piccinini, H., Casanova, M.A., Leme, L.A.P.P. et al. Publishing deep web geographic data. Geoinformatica 18, 769–792 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-013-0201-3

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