Analysis of Tourist Behavior Based on Tracking Data Collected by GPS

The chapter presents the design and validation of this comprehensive methodology, and the early results from a test application in the historical centre of the World Heritage city of Tarragona, a semi-enclosed area with unpredictable patterns of tourism mobility that typically suffer from congestion and flow management problems.

Methodologies for Augmented Discovery of Geospatial Resources

Different strategies can be adopted in order to enable new ways of searching geospatial resources, leveraging the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies. The authors propose a Discovery Augmentation Methodology which is essentially driven by the idea of enriching the searchable information that is associated with geospatial resources. They describe and discuss three different high-level approaches for discovery augmentation: Provider-based, User-based, and Third-party based. From the analysis of these approaches, the authors suggest that, due to their flexibility and extensibility, the user-based and the third-party based approaches result more appropriate for heterogeneous and changing environments such as the SDI one. For the user-based approach, they describe a conceptual architecture and the main components centered on the integration of user-generated content in SDIs. For the third-party approach, the authors describe an architecture enabling semantics-based searches in SDIs.

Automatic Metadata Generation for Geospatial Resource Discovery

In the metadata generation context, metadata extraction is the first and most important stage in the production chain and has an enormous complexity due to the huge variety of storage formats for geospatial datasets. In addition, the authors analyze the current situation and importance of metadata in information systems and particularly in SDI. This chapter identifies and justifies the need to automate the metadata generation. In this context, the different metadata points of view according to their functions and interoperability levels are analyzed. Afterwards, different metadata generation methods and workflows, and various metadata generation related tools are reviewed, respectively. Finally, the authors introduce topics related to the automatic metadata generation that have neither been studied in depth nor prototypically implemented as future works.

User-Friendly Geoportal Interfaces for Geospatial Resource Discovery

The Spatial Data Infrastructure of Catalonia (IDEC) was launched in 2002. From the beginning, the Metadata Catalog (MC) service has been considered as one of the main pieces of the infrastructure. Building a metadata catalog is important for any Spatial Data Infrastructure to foster resource interoperability and integration. In addition to organizing, classifying, and sorting metadata records, one of the hardest parts in the IDEC was to design web applications that allow users to easily discover and access such geospatial resources. This chapter reviews the different trends in building friendly user interfaces of web applications to search and discovery metadata records through the evolution of user interface of the IDEC Geoportal.

Distributed Geospatial Data Management for Entomological and Epidemiological Studies

Since the authors were able to design all the supporting software, all syntactical interoperability was guaranteed by the use of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. The semantic interoperability was assured by design, by developing a unique data model. Data invariants are guaranteed either by the interface, with validation routines written in Javascript, or by the data constrains included in the database. Integration and interoperability with other BT programs might require some additional effort, but all the necessary semantic translation could be encapsulated into the WFS component.

New Discovery Methodologies in GIS

In the last decade, the availability of on-line resources, and also the number of users accessing those resources, has grown exponentially. The information retrieval process, which aims at the improvement of the access to such resources, has been the focus of interest of many researchers. The presence of geographic data in these repositories of information is surprisingly high (for example, note that most of the web pages about business contain information about the locations of their offices). In order to properly manage this geographic data, the information retrieval process has been extended using architectures, data structures, and other techniques developed by the GIS community. This has meant the beginning of a new research field called Geographic Information Retrieval. In this chapter, the authors present a study of the state-of-the-art of this new field, and they also highlight the main open problems that will concentrate efforts during the next years.

An Assessment of Several Taxonomies of Volunteered Geographic Information

User-Generated Content (UGC) in general, and Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) in particular, are becoming more important as sources for official data bases, such as those used in national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Discovering and assessing VGI as suitable geospatial resources for one’s purposes is hence becoming more important, but can be difficult. One way of assessing VGI resources is by classifying them into different types of resources, i.e. a taxonomy of resources. The question is whether such taxonomies can accurately identify suitable VGI resources. We assess five taxonomies both subjectively and using formal concept analysis to determine their discrimination adequacy, that is, how well the taxonomies discriminate between repositories containing UGC in general, or VGI in particular.

Managing Schema Evolution in a Federated Spatial Database System

In this chapter, an Automatic Schema Evolution Framework is explored and developed to more effectively manage schema evolution in a FSDBS. This framework provides a Schema Element Dependency Meta-Model, a set of Schema Change Templates, and incorporates view generation, view rewriting, and query rewriting as solutions. These developed methods ensure applications can accommodate schema changes and hence remain valid.

Data Mining Location-Based Social Networks for Geospatial Discovery

Modern, Internet-based social networks contain a wealth of information about each member. An integral part of an individual’s online profile is their Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) such as a user’s current geographical location. Social network members in different cities, countries, or continents engage in different activities due to accessibility, economy, culture, or other factors. The work here focuses on data mining separate groups of social network profiles according to their geography in order to discover information about a place. This results in keywords associated with a specific location and provides an automated way to describe a place in an up to date fashion based upon its current local residents. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) profiles from four different places are analyzed here and the results are presented as they relate to space, time, and activities.

Semantic Annotation of Geospatial RESTful Services Using External Resources

RESTful services are increasingly gaining traction over Web Services (WS-*). As with WS-* services, their semantic annotation can provide benefits in tasks related to their discovery, composition, and mediation. In this chapter, the authors present an approach to automate the semantic annotation of geospatial RESTful services using a cross-domain ontology like DBpedia, domain ontologies like GeoNames, and additional external resources (suggestion and synonym services). They use combinations of these resources to discover meanings for each of the parameters of the geospatial RESTful services and perform semantic annotations of them.