In the latest edition of the International Journal of Geo-Information, a paper authored by Dr. Linfang Ding, Dr. Guohui Xiao and prof. Diego Calvanese (all from the Faculty of Computer Science) and prof. Liqiu Meng (from TU Munich) was chosen as the cover story. The reason for such prominence is that the integration of Geodata is one of the most demanded tasks in a wide array of fields – from tourism to the oil extraction industry to climate change – and Calvanese and his colleague found a technology that suits the need. 

The main point is: is there a simple and lean system that leads to making better decisions and accurate predictions from the available data? Calvanese’s team came up with a solution called Ontop. Such a name was chosen because when handling heterogeneous data one sort of stands “on top” of them, looking down on them from above. In practice, with this technology data are considered not in their appearance or precise format, but in their substance, or what those data actually represent. Doing so, one is able to turn data into connected objects and then make sense out of them. 

For the cited paper, Ding, Xiao, and Calvanese not only used the Ontop technology in order to integrate data but they also exploited geovisual analytics technology (for which Meng is a world-leading expert) that should help the user understand the integrated data. The framework they proposed - called Ontology-based Geodata Integration for Geovisual Analytics (GOdIVA) - consists of two modules for data integration and analysis: an OBDI (ontology-based data integration) module, and a geovisual analytics (GeoVA) module, designed for the exploration of the integrated data. They tested the effectiveness of their framework using the spatiotemporal patterns of and the correlation between meteorological data and traffic data provided by the Open Data Portal of South Tyrol and by the Institute for Statistics of the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano (ASTAT). 

(zil)