A Review of Geospatial Semantic Information Modeling and Elicitation Approaches

Abstract

The present paper provides a review of two research topics that are central to geospatial semantics: information modeling and elicitation. The first topic deals with the development of ontologies at different levels of generality and formality, tailored to various needs and uses. The second topic involves a set of processes that aim to draw out latent knowledge from unstructured or semi-structured content: semantic-based extraction, enrichment, search, and analysis. These processes focus on eliciting a structured representation of information in various forms such as: semantic metadata, links to ontology concepts, a collection of topics, etc. The paper reviews the progress made over the last five years in these two very active areas of research. It discusses the problems and the challenges faced, highlights the types of semantic information formalized and extracted, as well as the methodologies and tools used, and identifies directions for future research.

Implicit, Formal, and Powerful Semantics in Geoinformation

“…Kokla et al [14] offers a comprehensive review of the contributions that represent a progress in geospatial semantics since 2015; it focuses around two main topics, i.e., information modeling (ontologies and their development) and (latent) knowledge elicitation (from unstructured or semi-structured content, based in particular on textual contents). This paper reviews more than 150 works; among them are papers that present categorizations of methods and approaches to geosemantics, such as [15][16][17][18][19].…”

“…Still, this list may be biased, being based on authors' views and reviews of a rapidly evolving literature, and some terms can have overlapping meanings. For instance, more recent reviews, such as Kokla et al [14], produced an increase in this term list, due to the emergence of mobile and social applications, IoT, AI, etc. in the last five years.…”

“…In [14], the extraction of implicit geosemantics is named "elicitation of semantic information". Under this interpretation, the term is used in a broader sense to encompass processes aimed to make latent knowledge explicit from unstructured or semi-structured contents.…”

“…Discovery, in the sense of "retrieval of geospatial information", is largely dependent on metadata. In turn, semantic characterization of metadata is regarded to as the primary means to achieve interoperability [171] in a domain that is otherwise fraught with heterogeneities [14,56]. Unleashing this potential typically amounts to relating metadata items to entities in the Web of Data (the Linked Open Data Cloud: https://lod-cloud.net/ accessed on 1 April 2021), such as terms from SKOS vocabularies, people and organizations in FOAF representations [172], etc.…”

“…In remote sensing, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) groups techniques aiming at segmenting and classifying objects and phenomena (represented by groups of pixels sharing common properties) in satellite images based on image analysis procedures that rely on a priori expert knowledge [35]. In recent years, application of ontologies enconding experts' knowledge is emerging [14]. Ontologies are used to associate some perceived concepts with their data representation [35].…”