Large amounts of geospatial data have been made available recently on the linked open data cloud and the portals of many national cartographic agencies (e.g., OpenStreetMap data, administrative geographies of various countries, or land cover/land use data sets). These datasets use various geospatial vocabularies and can be queried using SPARQL or its OGC-standardized extension GeoSPARQL. In this paper, we go beyond these approaches to offer a question-answering engine for natural language questions on top of linked geospatial data sources. Our system has been implemented as re-usable components of the Frankenstein question answering architecture. We give a detailed description of the system's architecture, its underlying algorithms, and its evaluation using a set of 201 natural language questions. The set of questions is offered to the research community as a gold standard dataset for the comparative evaluation of future geospatial question answering engines.
We introduce the temporal component of the stRDF data model and the stSPARQL query language, which have been recently proposed for the representation and querying of linked geospatial data that changes over time. With this temporal component in place, stSPARQL becomes a very expressive query language for linked geospatial data, going beyond the recent OGC standard GeoSPARQL, which has no support for valid time of triples. We present the implementation of the stSPARQL temporal component in the system Strabon, and study its performance experimentally. Strabon is shown to outperform all the systems it has been compared with.This work was supported in part by the European Commission project TELEIOS
a b s t r a c tAdvances in remote sensing technologies have allowed us to send an ever-increasing number of satellites in orbit around Earth. As a result, Earth Observation data archives have been constantly increasing in size in the last few years, and have become a valuable source of data for many scientific and application domains. When Earth Observation data is coupled with other data sources many pioneering applications can be developed. In this paper we show how Earth Observation data, ontologies, and linked geospatial data can be combined for the development of a wildfire monitoring service that goes beyond applications currently deployed in various Earth Observation data centers. The service has been developed in the context of European project TELEIOS that faces the challenges of extracting knowledge from Earth Observation data head-on, capturing this knowledge by semantic annotation encoded using Earth Observation ontologies, and combining these annotations with linked geospatial data to allow the development of interesting applications.
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