F.J. Zarazaga

University of Zaragoza | UNIZAR · Department of Computing and Systems Engineering

DGGSTools is a Python package and command-line application to process geospatial datasets within the spatial reference provided by the rHEALPix Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS). Its main objective is to provide the tools necessary to transform geospatial datasets to equivalent ones following the rHEALPix DGGS, and to allow its users to work with...

Accurate anticipation of the maize harvest date is important in the agricultural market, as it ensures the sustainability of food production in response to the increasing global demand for food. This paper proposes a predictive model to determine the optimal harvest time in maize plots using the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and cli...

While there are references available in the literature regarding learning experiences with Dataset-Based Learning (DBL) approaches, there is a noticeable absence of a standardized model for designing DBL activities. This gap was identified in this work after performing a systematic literature review (SLR). In contrast to other active learning metho...

Spain is the third-largest producer of pork meat in the world, and many farms in several regions depend on the evolution of this market. However, the current pricing system is unfair, as some actors have better market information than others. In this context, historical pricing is an easy-to-find and affordable data source that can help all agents...

Spain is the third-largest producer of pork meat in the world, and many farms in several regions depend on the evolution of this market. However, the current pricing system is unfair, as some actors have better market information than others. In this context, historical pricing is an easy-to-find and affordable data source that can help all agents...

This work presents the first steps toward developing specific technology for voice user interfaces for geographic information systems. Despite having many general elements, such as voice recognition libraries, the current technology still lacks the ability to fully understand and process the semantics that real users apply to command geographic inf...

Incunabula are the texts printed mainly during the second half of 15th century that are a key cultural element in a revolutionary period of the history and evolution of the book and the printing. In these books, the identification of their origin largely affects its academic, cultural, patrimonial, and economical value. This paper proposes a proces...

The discrete representation of resources in geospatial catalogues affects their information retrieval performance. The performance could be improved by using automatically generated clusters of related resources, which we name quasi-spatial dataset series. This work evaluates whether a clustering process can create quasi-spatial dataset series usin...

The content at the end of any hyperlink is subject to two phenomena: the link may break (Link Rot) or the content at the end of the link may no longer be the same as it was when it was created (Content Drift). Reference Rot denotes the combination of both effects. Spatial metadata records rely on hyperlinks for indicating the location of the resour...

Extensive unsupervised livestock farming is a habitual technique in many places around the globe. Animal release can be done for months, in large areas and with different species packing and behaving very differently. Nevertheless, the farmer’s needs are similar: where livestock is (and where has been) and how healthy they are. The geographical are...

Music can produce a positive effect in runners’ motivation and performance. Nevertheless, these effects vary depending on the user’s location, the emotions that she/he feels at each moment or the type of training session. In this paper, a context and emotion-aware system for the recommendation and playing of Spotify songs is presented. It consists...

This paper presents an idea for the development of a catalogue system for spatial datasets based onindexing both their metadata and theirfeatures. This characteristic is not available in spatial data catalogues in Spatial Data Infrastructures. This catalogue uses features forimproving the relevance of responses because metadata records may not conv...

In the European Union, production standards in the form of legal regulations play an important role in farming. Because of the increasing amount of regulations, it is desirable to transform human-oriented regulations into a set of computer-oriented rules to provide decision support through the Farm Management Information System. To obtain the logic...

As the new technological developments become increasingly complex, the creation of partnerships between companies and research centres becomes essential. Nowadays, there are several platforms trying to offer a stable innovation market that can be used for the transfer of innovation in water management. However, they neither allow a complete descrip...

The importance of cultural heritage for supporting the knowledge economy has promoted its digitisation and online publication. Many cultural heritage repositories have published millions of digitised items using semantic web technologies and Linked Data approaches. These repositories frequently use knowledge organisation systems to classify the res...

In recent years, some official reports, to produce best products regarding quality, quantity and economic conditions, recommend that the farming sector should benefit with new tools and techniques coming from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) realm. In this way, during last decade the deployment of sensing devices has increased consid...

Pests in crops produce important economic loses all around the world. To deal with them without damaging people or the environment, governments have established strict legislation and norms describing the products and procedures of use. However, since these norms frequently change to reflect scientific and technological advances, it is needed to pe...

Why are spatial catalogs as they are? Why do we complain somuch about their behavior? Do they really serve their purposeor should we already consider them technical debt? This articlequestions the current spatial catalogs proposing a different approach centered on searching metainformation constructed from the spatial objects contained in the data...

Currently, pest management practices require modern equipment and the use of complex information, such as regulations and guidelines. The complexity of regulations is the root cause of the emergence of automated solutions for compliance assessment by translating regulations into sets of machine-processable rules that can be run by specialized modul...

In the current world, it is easy to listen that everybody and everything is connected. Over this connected world, the concept of location-based services has grown in order to provide digital services in everyplace and at every time. Nevertheless, this is not 100% true because the connection is not guaranteed for many people and in many places. Thes...

The competence-based education recently launched in Spanish universities presents a set of abilities and skills that are difficult to teach to students in higher and more technologically-oriented grades. In this paper, a teaching intervention that is based on design methodologies is proposed, to upgrade the competitive capacities of computer engine...

Geospatial data catalogs enable users to discover and access geographical information. Prevailing solutions are document oriented and fragment the spatial continuum of the geospatial data into independent and disconnected resources described through metadata. Due to this, the complete answer for a query may be scattered across multiple resources, m...

Thesauri are knowledge models commonly used for information classification and retrieval whose structure is defined by standards that describe the main features the concepts and relations must have. However, following these standards requires a deep knowledge of the field the thesaurus is going to cover and experience in their creation. To help in...

Thesauri are knowledge models commonly used for information classification and retrieval whose structure is defined by standards such as the ISO 25964. However, when creators do not correctly follow the specifications, they construct models with inadequate concepts or relations that provide a limited usability. This paper describes a process that a...

This work evaluates and compares different supervised learning algorithms using a costsensitive approach to find a model that classifies legal rules related to pesticides as prohibitions and permissions. The naive Bayes classifier achieves the best results and it would be applicable because it doesn't misclassify prohibitions as permissions.

Consistency is an essential aspect of the quality of metadata. Inconsistent metadata records are harmful: given a themed query, the set of retrieved metadata records would contain descriptions of unrelated or irrelevant resources, and may even not contain some resources considered obvious. This is even worse when the description of the location is...

An efficient access to the contents provided through OGC web services, widely used in environmental information systems, is usually achieved by means of caching strategies. Service-owners may be interested in expressing the conditions required to allow for this. If these conditions are expressed in a machine-readable way, automatic harvesters can b...

Geospatial metadata is one of the key elements of the geographic resource catalogues on the Web. Catalogues such as GeoNetwork use the direct and indirect spatial references from metadata to process spatial queries. The visibility of resources in a collection often depends on the consistency of the descriptions that help to find resources. Spatiall...

The implementation of the INSPIRE directive requires to check the conformity of a large number of network services with the implementing rules of INSPIRE. The evaluation whether a service is fully conformant with INSPIRE is complex and requires the use of specialized testing tools that should report how verification has been made and should identif...

The limited semantics of thesauri and similar knowledge models hinder the searching and browsing possibilities of the bibliographic databases classified with this type of resource. This work proposes an automatic process to convert a knowledge model into a domain ontology through the alignment with DOLCE, an upper level ontology. This process is fa...

Environment-related authorisations are a relevant issue for environmental management. They require a considerable effort by the authorities, and this might result in substantial delays for the citizens. Implementing those authorisation processes by means of e-government services would improve efficiency and, consequently, citizen satisfaction. Envi...

Geonetwork systems are one of the most popular geographic resources catalogues on the Web. One of the key elements of the successful of Geonetwork is the Geospatial metadata. Geonetwork use the direct and indirect spatial references from the metadata to process the spatial queries. However the inconsistencies between direct and indirect spatial ref...

The validation of the metadata associated with digitalized maps is one of the main problems related to the preservation of cartographic information in digital map libraries. This article describes the first research phases of a new automatic method to ensure the validity of spatial metadata. The method is based on the combination of spatial cluster...

Metadata are a key element for the development of information infrastructures because they facilitate the semantic description of contents and services. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of metadata standards have become a barrier for the generation of these metadata. Many metadata editors are not useful anymore because they do not support t...

Orthoimages are essential in many Web applications to facilitate the background context that helps to understand other georeferenced information. Catalogues and service registries of Spatial Data Infrastructures do not necessarily register all the services providing access to imagery data on the Web, and it is not easy to automatically identify whe...

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) provide access to geospatial data and operations through interoperable Web services. These data and operations can be chained to set up specialized geospatial business processes, and these processes can give support to different applications. End users can benefit from these applications, while experts can integr...

La validación de metadatos asociados a mapas digitalizados es uno de los problemas más relevantes relacionados con la preservación de la información cartográfica en las Bibliotecas de Mapas Digitales. Este trabajo presenta las primeras fases de investigación de un nuevo método automático para asegurar su validez. Este método está basado en la combi...

Spatial Data Infrastructures often maintain directories of public geospatial Web Services built from Web services listed in their registries. However, registry data may be stale and incomplete because their maintenance depends on service owners. A solution is to back the registry with an active directory, or index, that lists Web services found by...

Jurisdictional domains are generally accepted political divisions of the earth surface that cover specific territorial and functional scopes over time. They are frequently used in information retrieval (IR) to classify and locate resources by means of their geographical location. However, the changes they suffer over time reduce their applicability...

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are large, open, distributed and standards-based information systems which intend to facilitate and promote the use of spatial data and spatial services on the Internet. Spatial data describe information tied with locations on Earth, while spatial services allow to manipulate spatial data following a Service Orie...

Web resources that are not part of any Spatial Data Infrastructure can be an important source of information. However, the incorporation of Web resources within a Spatial Data Infrastructure requires a significant effort to create metadata. This work presents an extensible architecture for an automatic characterisation of Web resources and a strate...

Purpose There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the perfor...

This paper presents an investigation about the servers available in March 2011 conforming to the Web Processing Service interface specification published by the geospatial standards organization Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in 2007. This interface specification gives support to standard Web-based geoprocessing. The data used in this research we...

The addition of Linked Data to the geographic standards may produce effective cost savings in spatial data production and use by improving some issues relevant to Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). The combination of Linked Data and SDIs, its benefits and challenges are collected in the report on Linked Data presented at 32nd ISO/TC 211 plenary in...

Semantic Web applications that include map visualization clients are becoming common. When the description of an entity contains coordinate pairs, semantic applications often lay them as pins on maps provided by Web mapping service applications, such as Google Maps. Nowadays, semantic applications cannot guarantee that those maps provide spatial in...

The OpenGIS Catalogue Services (CS) specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information and related resources in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. The CS specification also defines a HTTP protocol binding, which is called “Catal...

The Semantic Web is an attempt to add meaningful annotations to Web resources, services and content that requires developing reference ontologies, which help to understand these annotations. The venue of the Web of Data makes the geographic information, which has become an important part of the current Web, widely usable. This paper demonstrates h...

From the different types of ontology models, terminological ontologies are intensively used by libraries, archives, museums and any other registry of information to facilitate the location of stored resources (classification and information retrieval). Historically, terminological models were printed and used as thematic indexes to locate associate...

The applicability of thesauri in the classification and information retrieval context has promoted the creation and diffusion of well-established thesauri in many different domains. These simple models are useful for most of classification and retrieval systems where search requisites are not very elaborated; however, in contexts with an informatio...

Typical information infrastructures manage different terminological ontologies with a very different levels of specificity, language coverage integrated in their systems (e.g., from monolingual lists of terms to multilingual thesauri covering more than 20 languages), formalization, (e.g., from simple glossaries to well-structured thesauri), or size...

According to Gruber [69], an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose. A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualization: the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed to exist in some...

The use of suitable terminological ontologies is vital in classification and information retrieval to obtain high quality results. For example, in a discovery system, if the resources are annotated using a vocabulary that does not contain all the required terms to describe the collection, the construction of an effective search system becomes much...

The previous chapters have focused on describing different strategies, processes, components and systems to improve the management of terminological ontologies. This chapter takes all those elements and applies them to improve information discovery and retrieval in an information infrastructure.

In any information infrastructure, the information retrieval components have a special relevance because they are the components that provide the first point of access to the contents. Improving these components involves an improvement in the entire infrastructure environment, making the resource holdings easier to find and access.

With the vertiginous volume information growing, the amount of answers provided by traditional search engines and satisfying syntactically the user queries has enlarged directly. In order to reduce this problem the race to develop Semantic Search Engines (SSE) is increasingly popular. Currently, there are multiple proposals for Semantic Search Eng...

Geocoding has become one of the most popular on-line services. Nowadays, there exist many Web Services providing geocoding functionality which differ not only in technological aspects (interface, invocation style, etc.) or terms of use, but also in type of geographic information provided and spatial data quality. Currently, there is no problem to f...

This work proposes an architectural style, a pattern, for spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). This style provides a tool and a shared vocabulary to help system architects to design these infrastructures, and facilitates the exchange of knowledge about them. This style is defined under the component‐and‐connector architectural viewtype, extending t...

The general concern about environmental issues has involved the creation of national and international policies that require, at a technical level, the analysis, merging and processing of data obtained from very different sources. This paper proposes an approach for the integration of hydrological data that is based on the use of a multilingual ont...

Ibáñez de Ibero, 3, 28003-Madrid (Spain) afrodriguez@fomento.es 3 GeoSpatiumLab Carlos Marx, 4, local der., 50015-Zaragoza (Spain) Abstract In order to facilitate the availability of and access to spatial data, Spatial Data Infrastructures must set up a series of services to be reused by their community of users in the construction of different app...

This chapter introduces Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and establishes their strong conceptual and technical relationships with geographic digital libraries (geolibraries). The authors describe the origin of SDIs and highlight their role as geographic resources providers. Then, they give several examples of the use of techniques and tools taken...

A new collaboration paradigm is in order between Digital Libraries (DL) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These important Information Technology (IT) fields have witnessed great progress in the last few years, only to be surpassed by even greater expectations. Nonetheless, this extraordinary advance has come at a cost: the very proliferatio...

The administrative units have been created with the purpose of covering specific territorial and functional scopes over time. Therefore, there are heterogeneity not only among states but also at any level of subdivision. In the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures, administrative units are part of the core data model and they are often exploite...

The aim of this research is to provide a simple way for water quality monitoring in a set of reservoirs using an earth observation based approach and the assessment of the use of this technique for a monitoring networks in order to meet the requirements and objectives of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) by the Member States. The study carried ou...

This article aims at providing a simple way for water quality monitoring in a set of reservoirs using an earth observation-based approach and the assessment of the use of this technique for a monitoring network in order to meet the requirements and objectives of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) by the Member States of the European Union. The stu...

Ontologies are used within the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures to denote a formally represented knowledge that is used to improve data sharing and information retrieval. Given the increasing relevance of semantic interoperability in this context, this work presents the specification and development of a Web Ontology Service (WOS), based on...

Spatial Data Infrastructures at national or higher levels usually comprise the access to multiple geographic data catalogs. However, with classical search systems, it is difficult to have a clear idea of the information contained in the metadata holdings of these catalogs. This paper describes a set of clustering techniques to create a thematic cla...

Spatial Data Infrastructures at national or higher levels usu-ally comprise the access to multiple geographic data catalogs. However, with classical search systems, it is difficult to have a clear idea of the information contained in the metadata holdings of these catalogs. This paper describes a set of clustering techniques to create a thematic cl...

Knowledge organization systems denotes formally represented knowledge that is used within the context of digital libraries to improve data sharing and information retrieval. To increase their use, and to reuse them when possible, it is vital to manage them adequately and to provide them in a standard interchange format. Simple knowledge organizatio...