Javier Lacasta

• University of Zaragoza

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...

Over the last decade, many Open Data initiatives have been launched by public administrations to promote transparency and reuse of data. However, it is not easy to assess the impact of data availability from the perspective of user communities. Although some Open Data portals provide mechanisms for user feedback through dedicated discussion forums...

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...

Image denoising attempts to restore images that have been degraded. Historical document denoising is specially challenging because there is considerable background noise or variation in contrast and illumination in handwritten literature and the first times of the printing press. The main objective of this work is to propose a new method for histor...

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...

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 analysis of factors influencing urban shrinkage is of great interest to spatial planners and policy makers. Population loss is usually the most relevant indicator of this shrinkage, but many other factors interact in complex ways over time. This paper proposes a multidimensional and spatio-temporal analysis of the shrinkage process in Spanish m...

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...

Durante las últimas décadas se han ido creando numerosos portales web para diseminar el patrimonio cultural. La mayoría de estos portales se crearon en tiempos de la web sintáctica generando páginas HTML con texto plano indexable por buscadores, pero sin metadatos añadidos y anotaciones de conceptos pertenecientes a modelos de organización del cono...

En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de la evaluación de la calidad de los conjuntos de datos abiertos sobre presupuestos disponibles en España. Para llevar a cabo la comparativa de evaluación se ha adoptado la Metodología de Evaluación de la Calidad de los Metadatos propuesta por el Portal de Datos Europeo (MQA). Se ha adaptado una metodolo...

During the last decade, numerous governmental, educational or cultural institutions have launched Open Data initiatives that have facilitated the access to large volumes of datasets on the web. The main way to disseminate this availability of data has been the deployment of Open Data catalogs exposing metadata of these datasets, which are easily in...

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...

With recent advances in remote sensing, location-based services and other related technologies, the production of geospatial information has exponentially increased in the last decades. Furthermore, to facilitate discovery and efficient access to such information, spatial data infrastructures were promoted and standardized, with a consideration tha...

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...

During last years governments have promoted the digitisation and on-line access to cultural heritage due to its importance for supporting the knowledge economy. Initiatives like Europeana or UNESCO Memory of the World Programme have encouraged the creation of cultural heritage repositories, which currently contain millions of digitized items. Many...

Este trabajo presenta una metodología para el estudio de modelos de organización del conocimiento (vocabularios controlados, tesauros, ontologías) utilizados en la anotación temática de recursos de patrimonio cultural en la web de datos: desde la identificación de las fuentes de datos, hasta la selección, acceso y análisis de la calidad de los mode...

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...

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...

La información geoespacial es comúnmente proporcionada por servicios web estándar. Sin embargo, en muchos casos es difícil encontrar que servicios contienen la información deseada. Este artículo propone un proceso para construir un modelo geoespacial de datos enlazados que facilite la búsqueda de información geoespacial en la web.

Jurisdictional domains are legal divisions of the Earth’s surface frequently used in classification and search systems for location-based queries. However, there are few compilations of jurisdictional domains that include their evolution. One of the causes is the complexity of their generation. As an advance in this area, this paper describes a pro...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

Metadata catalogues are used for facilitating the discovery of data and web services in, e.g., growing collections of Earth observation resources. Two conditions need to be met in order to successfully retrieve resources in catalogues: the metadata describing resources have to be complete and accurate and the keywords used in searches semantically...

Since the development of ontologies from scratch requires much time and many resources, the activity of knowledge acquisition constitutes one of the most important steps at the beginning of the ontology development process. This activity is essential in all the different methodologies for ontology design as a previous step to the conceptualization...

In the information retrieval context, resource collections are frequently classified using thesauri. However, the limited semantics provided by thesauri restricts the collection search and browsing capabilities. This work focuses on improving these capabilities by transforming a set of resources indexed according to a thesaurus into a semantically...

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.

Ontology learning is the term used to encompass methods and tech-niques employed for the (semi-)automatic processing of knowledge resources that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge during ontology construction. This chapter focuses on ontology learning techniques using thesauri as input sources. Thesauri are one of the most promising sources fo...

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...

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...

Geographic metadata quality is one of the most important aspects on the performance of Geographic Digital Libraries. After re- viewing previous attempts outside the geographic domain, this paper presents early results from a series of experiments for the development of a quantitative method for quality assessment. The methodology is de- veloped thr...

Geographic metadata quality is one of the most important aspects on the performance of Geographic Digital Libraries. After reviewing previous attempts outside the geographic domain, this paper presents early results from a series of experiments for the development of a quantitative method for quality assessment. The methodology is developed through...

The use of metadata expands on the opportunities for interoperability. Interoperability involves making multiple information sources access, manipulate and share data across their boundaries. Metadata descriptions from different domains are not semantically distinct but overlap and relate to each other in complex ways. As the number, size and compl...

Information in Digital Libraries is explicitly organized, described, and managed. The content of their data resources is summarized into small descriptions, usually called metadata, which can be either introduced manually or automatically generated. In this context, specialized thesauri are frequently used to provide accurate content for subject or...

The research goal of the drought strategic area within the context of the EuroGEOSS project is to evaluate the feasibility of integrating local, national and multinational drought monitoring systems in Europe as a European contribution to a Global Drought Monitoring System. For this purpose, an initial operating capacity (IOC) has been created invo...

Metadata are "data about data", that is to say, they describe the content, quality, condi-tion, and other characteristics of data in order to help a person to locate and understand data. Nevertheless, maybe one of the main problems for launching a Spatial Data Infra-structure (SDI) is to have appropriate and well-defined contents for its catalogues...