Towards the Semantic Enrichment of Trajectories Using Spatial Data Infrastructures

The term Semantic Trajectories of Moving Objects (STMO) corresponds to a sequence of spatial-temporal points with associated semantic information (for example, annotations about locations visited by the user or types of transportation used). However, the growth of Big Data generated by users, such as data produced by social networks or collected by an electronic equipment with embedded sensors, causes the STMO to require services and standards for enabling data documentation and ensuring the quality of STMOs. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), on the other hand, provide a shared interoperable and integrated environment for data documentation. The main challenge is how to lead traditional SDIs to evolve to an STMO document due to the lack of specific metadata standards and services for semantic annotation. This paper presents a new concept of SDI for STMO, named SDI4Trajectory, which supports the documentation of different types of STMO—holistic trajectories, for example. The SDI4Trajectory allows us to propose semi-automatic and manual semantic enrichment processes, which are efficient in supporting semantic annotations and STMO documentation as well. These processes are hardly found in traditional SDIs and have been developed through Web and semantic micro-services. To validate the SDI4Trajectory, we used a dataset collected by voluntary users through the MyTracks application for the following purposes: (i) comparing the semi-automatic and manual semantic enrichment processes in the SDI4Trajectory; (ii) investigating the viability of the documentation processes carried out by the SDI4Trajectory, which was able to document all the collected trajectories.

The Austrian Semantic EO Data Cube Infrastructure

Big optical Earth observation (EO) data analytics usually start from numerical, sub-symbolic reflectance values that lack inherent semantic information (meaning) and require interpretation. However, interpretation is an ill-posed problem that is difficult for many users to solve. Our semantic EO data cube architecture aims to implement computer vision in EO data cubes as an explainable artificial intelligence approach. Automatic semantic enrichment provides semi-symbolic spectral categories for all observations as an initial interpretation of color information. Users graphically create knowledge-based semantic models in a convergence-of-evidence approach, where color information is modelled a-priori as one property of semantic concepts, such as land cover entities. This differs from other approaches that do not use a-priori knowledge and assume a direct 1:1 relationship between reflectance values and land cover. The semantic models are explainable, transferable, reusable, and users can share them in a knowledgebase. We provide insights into our web-based architecture, called Sen2Cube.at, including semantic enrichment, data models, knowledge engineering, semantic querying, and the graphical user interface. Our implemented prototype uses all Sentinel-2 MSI images covering Austria; however, the approach is transferable to other geographical regions and sensors. We demonstrate that explainable, knowledge-based big EO data analysis is possible via graphical semantic querying in EO data cubes.

Efficient Semantic Enrichment Process for Spatiotemporal Trajectories

The increasing availability of location-acquisition technologies has enabled collecting large-scale spatiotemporal trajectories, from which we can derive semantic information in urban environments, including location, time, direction, speed, and point of interest. Such semantic information can give us a semantic interpretation of movement behaviors of moving objects. However, existing semantic enrichment process approaches, which can produce semantic trajectories, are generally time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an efficient semantic enrichment process framework to annotate spatiotemporal trajectories by using geographic and application domain knowledge. The framework mainly includes preannotated semantic trajectory storage phase, spatiotemporal similarity measurement phase, and semantic information matching phase. Having observed the common trajectories in the same geospatial object scenes, we propose a semantic information matching algorithm to match semantic information in preannotated semantic trajectories to new spatiotemporal trajectories. In order to improve the efficiency of this approach, we build a spatial index to enhance the preannotated semantic trajectories. Finally, the experimental results based on a real dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches.