Tomi Kauppinen

• PhD, MSc
• PostDoc Position at Aalto University

The Linked Data paradigm has made significant inroads into research and practice around spatial information and it is time to reflect on what this means for GIScience. Technically, Linked Data is just data in the simplest possible data model (that of triples), allowing for linking records or data sets anywhere across the web using controlled semant...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach to crowdsource information about geospatial features around us. People around the world are engaged with typing in their observations about the world (like locations of shops, cafeterias), or to semi-automatically gather them with mobile devices (like hiking paths or roads). In this process pe...

Linked Open Science is an approach to solve challenges of an executable paper. It is a combination of four “silver bullets”: 1) publication of scientific data, metadata, results, and provenance information using Linked Data principles, 2) open source and web-based environments for executing, validating and exploring research, 3) Cloud Computing for...

Digital games transform our lives; they provide an opportunity to engage with other worlds in a playful way, in many ways similarly to what other forms of audio-visual communication (like movies, paintings or photos) have offered for a longer time. However, learning materials still use rather traditional ways for accompanying media, ranging from st...

Recent years have witnessed progress of public institutions in making their datasets available online, free of charge, for re-use. There have been however limited studies which assess the actual effectiveness of different communication media in making key facts visible to citizens. This article analysed and systematically compared two representatio...

Recent years have witnessed progress of public institutions in making their datasets available online, free of charge, for re-use. This notwithstanding, there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. This article suggests that transparency in the context of open government can be increased through web maps featur...

With the advent of the newest emergency call mandates in US and Europe, with the advances in cellular-based and WiFi-based localization solutions, and with the developments of cloud computing and web-based social networks, the location information and movement-related data is becoming easier and easier to collect from the user mobile devices and fr...

Crowdsensing can provide real time and detailed information about rapidly evolving crisis situations to facilitate rapid response and effective resource allocation. But while challenges such as heterogeneity of data content and quality, asynchronicity, and volume call for robust data integration and interpretation capabilities, situation awareness...

VISUAL 2014 addressed the challenges in providing knowledge engineers and data analysts with visualizations and well-designed user interfaces to support the understanding of the concepts, data instances and relationships in different domains. The workshop was organized around two tracks: one focused on visualizations and user interfaces for Knowled...

Nous nous intéressons à la représentation des informations géographiques extraites d'articles scientifiques. En utilisant des outils de Traitement Automatique des Langues et de géo-codage, nous avons traité la revue PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases afin de produire des données spatiales liées aux articles sous forme de Linked Data. Les résultats mo...

With the ubiquity of technology and tools, current Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) projects allow the public to contribute, maintain, and use geo-spatial data. One of the most prominent and successful VGI project is OpenStreetMap (OSM), where more than one million volunteers collected and contributed data that is obtainable for everybody....

Background: Healthcare organizations around the world are challenged by pressures to reduce cost, improve coordination and outcome, and provide more with less. This requires effective planning and evidence-based practice by generating important information from available data. Thus, flexible and user-friendly ways to represent, query, and visualiz...

Visual exploration of data enables users and analysts observe interesting patterns that can trigger new research for further investigation. With the increasing availability of Linked Data, facilitating support for making sense of the data via visual exploration tools for hypothesis generation is critical. Time and space play important roles in this...

Semantic technologies are prominent for gathering human sensor observations. Linked Data supports sharing and accessing of not just data but also vocabularies describing the data. Human sensor observations are often a combination of natural language and categorizable entries, thus calling for semantic treatment. Space and time serve as natural inte...

In this work we outline the vision of geographic information observatories, explain how and why GIScience would benefit from broadening its range to studies of the information universe (without necessarily relating it back to the physical universe), how our technology stack puts the GIScience community in a unique position to develop such observato...

Exploring complex spatiotemporal data can be very challenging for non-experts. Recently, gestural interaction has emerged as a promis- ing option, which has been successfully applied to various domains, including simple map control. In this paper, we investigate whether gestures can be used to enable non-experts to explore and understand complex sp...

University data is typically stored in separate data silos even though the data is implicitly richly related together. Such data has a large and diverse user base, including faculty members, students, industrial partners, alumnis, collaborating universities, and media. In this paper, we demonstrate two tools for understanding and using the contents...

Semantic and context knowledge has been envisioned as an appropriate solution for addressing the content heterogeneity and information overload in mobile Web information access, but few have explored their full potential in mobile scenarios, where information objects refer to their physical counterparts, and retrieval is context-aware and personali...

The Linked Brazilian Amazon Rainforest Data contains observations about deforestation of rainforests and related things such as rivers, road networks, population, amount of cattle, and market prices of agricultural products. The Linked Data approach offers thus to combine ecological, economical and social dimensions together. Our aim has been to 1)...

In this paper, we argue that sensors provide a better understanding of geographic events. They produce observations that reflect the natural events taking place at a particular location. The essential part of deriving information about geographic events from sensor observations is to formalize the relations between them. In this spirit, we develop...

Metadata for scientific publications contain various explicit and implicit spatio-temporal references. Data on conference locations as well as author and editor affiliations – both changing over time – enable insights into the geographic distribution of scientific fields and particular specializations. At the same time, these byproducts of scientif...

Increasing availability of GPS-enabled devices technically enables a broad variety of people to participate in the volunteered geographic information (VGI) movement and to collect and share information about places and spatial entities. But in order to be useful, geo-data has to be correctly classified, and inexperienced users need assistance to be...

The process of spatial data quality evaluation is a set of interrelated activities aiming to produce a data quality result, and moreover, to fulfil the quality requirements set forth by the customers. The quality evaluation must be done in a consistent manner in order to determine whether the achieved quality level meets the requirements, and also...

The Linked Open Data University of Münster (LODUM) project establishes a university-wide infrastructure to publish university data as Linked Open Data. The main goals are to increase visibility and accessibility of data produced and collected at the university, and to facilitate effective reuse of these data. This includes the goal to ease the deve...

This article presents the vision and results of creating the basis for a national semantic web content infrastructure in Finland in 2003–2007. The main elements of the infrastructure are shared and open metadata schemas, core ontologies, and public ontology services. Several practical applications testing and demonstrating the usefulness of the inf...

This paper reviews to what extent Linked Data can support information management in the humanitarian decision - making processes during the early stages of a disaster response. ON the immediate inset of a disaster there is little or no reliable information, especially about the affected population and the presence of relief agencies including their...

This paper shows how Linked Open Data can ease the challenges of information triage in disaster response efforts. Recently, disaster management has seen a revolution in data collection. Local victims as well as people all over the world collect observations and make them available on the web. Yet, this crucial and timely information source comes un...

Georeferencing and semantic annotations improve the find-ability of geoinformation because they exploit relationships to existing data and hence facilitate queries. Unlike georeferencing, which grounds location information in reference points on the earth's surface, seman-tic annotations often lack relations to entities of shared experience. We sug...

We propose to use the trustworthiness of features in Open-StreetMap as a proxy function for data quality, where a feature's trust value is computed solely from its history. The trustworthiness is based on the different contribution patterns that can be found in a feature's history, such as rollbacks or deletions. We argue that these patterns influe...

With an increasing number of applications building on Open-StreetMap, data quality is becoming a pressing issue. Data provenance gives useful hints that facilitate data quality assessments based on the features' persistence. However, this requires a detailed analysis of the editing history and the corresponding contributors. In order to make this p...

Place names and their geographical coverage change in time. This causes problems when retrieving information content related to different times. Geo-content is usually indexed using place names of the time of indexing (e.g. a photo of the 1968 upraise of Czechoslovakia indexed then) or of the time that the content has been used or created (e.g. a s...

Georeferencing and semantic annotations improve the find-ability of geoinformation because they exploit relationships to existing data and hence facilitate queries. Unlike georeferencing, which grounds location information in reference points on the earth's surface, semantic annotations often lack relations to entities of shared experience. We sugg...

Georeferencing and semantic annotations improve the find- ability of geoinformation because they exploit relationships to existing data and hence facilitate queries. Unlike georeferencing, which grounds location information in reference points on the earth's surface, seman- tic annotations often lack relations to entities of shared experience. We s...

Time is an essential concept in cultural heritage applications. Instances of temporal concepts such as time intervals are used for the annotation of cultural objects and also for querying datasets containing information about these objects. Hence it is important to match query and annotation intervals by examining their similarity or closeness. One...

People frequently need to find knowledge related to places when they plan a leisure trip, when they are executing that plan in a certain place, or when they want to virtually explore a place they have visited in the past. In this chapter the authors present and discuss a set of methods for searching and browsing spatio-temporally referenced knowled...

CultureSampo is an application demonstration of a national level publication system of cultural heritage contents on the Web, based on ideas and technologies of the Semantic (Web and) Web 2.0. On the semantic side, the system presents new solutions to interoperability problems of dealing with multiple ontologies of different domains, and to problem...

In this paper we present an ontology-based query expansion widget which utilizes the ontologies published in the ONKI Ontology Service. The widget can be integrated into a web page, e.g. a search system of a museum catalogue, enhancing the page by providing a query expansion functionality. We have tested the system with general, domain-specific and...

Ontologies aim to capture knowledge about things and their relationships. Publishing ontologies on the Semantic Web enables people and organizations to use shared ontologies in annotating e.g. photographs, videos, music, and other types of cultural objects. Search engines also use relationships provided by ontologies in semantic search, e.g. for qu...

Semantic web techniques can be used to relate two things together. However, usually this relation is not accompanied with a measure that would tell how interesting the relation is. Data mining tradition provides interestingness measures; it is natural to try and fit semantic web and data mining traditions together. In this paper we use support and...

SMARTMUSEUM (Cultural Heritage Knowledge Exchange Platform) is a Research and Development project sponsored under theEuropeans Commission's 7th Framework. The overall objective of the project is to develop a platform for innovative servicesenhancing on-site personalized access to digital cultural heritage through adaptive and privacy preserving use...

Content annotations in semantic cultural heritage portals commonly make spatiotemporal references to historical regions and places using names whose meanings are different in different times. For example, historical administrational regions such as countries, municipalities, and cities have been renamed, merged together, split into parts, and annex...

Geographic place names are semantically often highly am- biguous. For example, there are 491 places in Finland sharing the same name "Isosaari" (great island) that are instances of several geographical classes, such as Island, Forest, Peninsula, Inhabited area, etc. Referenc- ing unambiguously to a particular "Isosaari", either when annotating cont...

In this paper we examine 1) the scope of geo-ontologies used especially for the purposes of information retrieval on the Web, 2) the core geographical concepts and their mutual relations, and 3) the properties the concepts have. Furthermore, we present the Finnish geo-ontology (Suomalainen paikkaontologia, SUO) and discuss the theories and principl...

This paper presents the national level cross-domain ontology and ontology service infrastructure ONKI used in Finland. The novelty of ONKI is based on two ideas. First, the core ontologies are developed collaboratively by experts transforming thesauri into mutually aligned lightweight ontologies, based on a large top ontology that is extended by va...

This paper presents the semantic portal CULTURESAMPO---Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web. The portal provides memory organizations and other cultural content publishers with a national, shared semantic publication channel for heteroge- nous cultural contents. The content comes from over ten organizations and is annotated using various ontologies...

This paper presents the Semantic Web 2.0 application CULTURESAMPO, an ambitious system of creating a collective semantic memory of the cultural heritage of a nation on the Semantic Web 2.0, combining ideas underlying the Semantic Web and the Web 2.0. The system addresses the semantic challenge of aggregating highly heterogeneous, cross-domain cultu...

Geographic place names are widely used but are semantically often highly ambiguous. For example, there are 491 places in Finland sharing the same name "Isosaari" (great island) that are instances of several geographical classes, such as Island, Forest, Peninsula, Inhabited area, etc. Referencing unambiguously to a particular "Isosaari", either when...

This article presents the vision and results of creating the basis for a national semantic Web content infrastructure in Finland in 2003-2007. The main elements of the infrastructure are shared and open metadata schemas, core ontologies, and public ontology services. Several practical applications testing and demonstrating the usefulness of the inf...

Geographic place names are widely used in databases, but are semantically often highly ambiguous. For example, there are 491 places in Finland sharing the same name "Isosaari" (great island) that are instances of several geographical classes, such as Isla nd, Forest, Field, Peninsula, Inhabited area, etc. Referencing unambiguously to a particular "...

A lot of functionality is needed when an application, such as a museum cataloguing system, is extended with semantic capabilities, for example ontological indexing functionality or multi-facet search. To avoid duplicate work and to enable easy and cost-efficient integration of information systems with the Semantic Web, we propose a web widget appro...

Ontologies evolve when the underlying domain world changes at different points of time. The result then is a series of ontologies whose concepts are related with each other not only within one ontology valid at a moment but through the time, too. This chapter presents a model for representing ontology time series. The focus is on modeling partial o...

Geographic knowledge is essential in handling a large variety of resources, including cultural contents such as museum artifacts, maps, books, photographs, and videos. The metadata of such resources often need to refer to geographic entities or regions, both modern and historical ones overlapping each other on the map. For example, a cultural artif...

A lot of functionality is needed when an application, such as a museum cataloguing system, is extended with semantic capabilities, for example ontological indexing functionality or multi-facet search. To avoid duplicate work and to enable easy and cost-ecient integration of information systems with the Semantic Web, we propose a mash-up approach. H...

Geographic knowledge is essential in handling a large variety of resources, including cultural contents such as museum artifacts, maps, books, photographs, and videos. The metadata of such resources often need to refer to a geographic entity or region, for example to the place where an artifact was produced, used, or found. In this paper, we examin...

We present a national ontology development and service framework being developed in Finland in 2003-2007. The framework is based on a set of related core ontologies, most notably on a national upper ontology based on the commonly used Finnish General Thesaurus YSA maintained by the National Library of Finland. The framework implements three ontolog...

Ontologies evolve when the underlying domain world changes at different points of time. In historical geospatial domain, for example, the result then is chains of changes like merges and splits between ontology resources. Our focus is on mod-eling and determining partial overlap, i.e. the coverage be-tween the ontology resources. The idea is to pro...

We present a national ontology development and service framework being developed in Finland in 2003-2007. Our goal is to initiate and support col- laborative ontology development processes of var- ious expert groups now developing keyword the- sauri. The framework is based on a set of related core ontologies, most notably on a national up- per onto...

The application service provider (ASP) model is not novel, but widely used in several non-health care-related business areas. In this article, ASP is described as a potential solution for long-term and back-up archiving of the picture archiving and communication system (PACS) of the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS). HUSpacs is a regi...

HUS Helsinki Medical Imaging Center (HMIC) , a part of the hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa, produces medical imaging services. As nearly all healthcare providers in industrialised countries, also HMIC is under pressure to improve the management of the increasing costs. Healthcare providers are facing growing demand for care and high expec...

Healthcare providers are facing increasing pressure to become more cost efficient. There is also a need to provide objective evidence concerning efficiency and quality. Time based competition and work-in-progress concepts have been used to measure and improve the efficiency of industrial manufacturing. When unproductive time is reduced it is often...

Ontologies evolve over time, when they are altered to correct errors, to accommodate new information or to adjust the representation of the domain. Hence there is a need for methods and means to manage the ontology evolution in order to ensure that applications using different versions of an ontology re- main compatible with respect each other and...

This paper presents a semantic recommender method and a system for a personalized access to digital cultural heritage through context-aware user pro-filing. Given annotation knowledge-bases, explicit background knowledge in the form of ontologies, a user model capturing the user's behavior and context, the system produces recommendations. Ontology-...

tomi.kauppinen@tkk.fi), Tuukka Ruotsalo 1 (tuukka.ruotsalo@tkk.fi) Frédéric Weis 2 (frederic.weis@irisa.fr), Sylvain Roche 2 (sylvain.roche@irisa.fr), Marco Berni 3 (marco@imss.fi.it), Eetu Mäkelä 1 (eetu.makela@tkk.fi), Nima Dokoohaki 4 (nimad@kth.se), Eero Hyvönen 1 (eero.hyvonen@tkk.fi) Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH) 4 Abstract...