1. Semantic Web Adapter for Geo Spatial Data
Shantnu Jain
MS GIS
Guided By : Dr. Latifur Khan
Deptt. of Computer Science.

2. Content Introduction What is Semantic Web? Its Components
Research Question?
Literature Review
Similar Application
DAGIS System Overview
Project Overview
Semantic Web Adapter
Result
Potential Application
Conclusion
Future Research

3. Introduction Plenty of Information available on the Internet.
Search Engine mostly do Keyword Based Searching.
Compare, query, analyze, combine, or integrate data cannot be carried out due to the lack of methods that make compatible information available.
Same problem continues with Geo Spatial Data.
Here, we propose a conversion mediator that converts shape file to RDF document for achieving data level semantics when the underlying data model necessitates the need for suitable annotation for achieving data semantics,

4. Semantic Web
Project to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer process-able meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web (To minimize Human Intervention).
Its a vision of web pages that are understandable by computers, so that they can search websites and perform actions in a standardized way.
HTML of a web page can make simple, document-level assertions such as the title of the document,
but nothing beyond that.

5. Semantic Web HTML of a page cannot assert that
any item XYZ has price of $ X or
it’s a consumer product or a Gadget,
Because HTML does not have any built in Capacity to identify the Properties.
Solution : Semantic Web addresses this issue with the help of OWL (Web Ontology Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework).

6. Semantic Web
RDF and OWL tech’s are combined to provide descriptions that supplement the content of Web documents .
machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content,
thereby facilitating automated information gathering and research by computers.

7. Semantic Web and its Components
XML provides a surface syntax for structured documents,
but imposes no semantic constraints on the meaning of these documents.
RDF is a simple data model for referring to objects ("resources") and how they are related.
OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF Resources.

8. Research Question
Is it possible to convert industry standard Geo-Spatial format “Shapefile” into Semantic Web standard format “RDF”?

9. Literature Review
Josh Lieberman, Traverse Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA, Todd Pehle, Northrup Grumman TASC, St. Louis, MO, USA, Mike Dean, BBN Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, “Semantic Evolution of Geospatial Web Services”,
Dr.Bhavani Thuraisingham, Ganesh Subbiah, Ashraful Alam, Dr. Latifur Khan, “An Integrated Platform for Secure GeoSpatial Information Exchange through the Semantic Web”, ACM Workshop on Secure Web Services (SWS), Nov 2006, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.
M. Goodchild, M. Egenhofer, R. Fegeas, and C. Kottman Eds., “Interoperating Geographic Information Systems”, Kluwer, 1999
A. Vckovski, K. Brassel, and H.-J. Schek Eds. “Interoperating Geographic Information Systems”, Second International Conference, INTEROP'99, Zurich,Switzerland, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1999.

10. Similar Application Based on the concepts of Semantic Web in
Geo Spatial Domain is SPIRIT search Engine.
SPIRIT (Spatially-Aware Information Retrieval on the Internet)
Spatially-aware search engine to find documents and datasets on the web relating to places or regions referred to in a query.
Automatic semantic annotation of Internet resources with metadata on the geographical context of resource content

11. Similar Application SPIRIT Answers queries like:
(European Commission Funded Project, combined project from Different schools headed by Deptt of Computer Science at Cardiff University. )
Answers queries like:
- Rivers which are located
in North of London?
- Hotels near Airport in Zurich?

12. Motivation for the Project: DAGIS Frame Work (Discovery of Annotated GeoSpatial Information Services)
Research Project going in Data and Application Security Lab in Computer Science Department,
University of Texas at Dallas.
Under Dr. Bhavani and Dr. Khan

13. SYSTEM OVERVIEW (DAGIS)
Service Requestor automatically discovers the relevant services

14. SYSTEM OVERVIEW (DAGIS) Motivating Scenario
Service Requestor automatically discovers the relevant services
Web Service (RDF)
Web Service (RDF)
Adaptor
Shape file source

15. Data Flow in DAGIS Framework
User
Query
Disambiguation
Service
Discovery
Matchmaking
Service Selection
and Composition
Response

16. Project Overview Divided into 3 Parts :
1. Ontologies. (Alam Ashraful,PhD Candiate, Computer Science,UTD)
2. RDF. (My Work - Semantic Web Adapter for Geo Spatial Data)
3. Web Services. (Ganesh Subbiah, MS,Computer Science, UTD)

17. Semantic Web Adapter for Geo Spatial Data (First, more detail on RDF)
Semantic Web (RDF Model)
2 concepts that help in Context Building
Logic-aware languages (help in Mach to Machine Communication)
Ontology sharing and reuse (you define & publish,others extend)
RDF Data Model:
There’re mainly two concepts from Semantic Web that are useful for us in the context of building a semantic geospatial web. First is logic-enabled languages. One example is the Web Ontology Language that is descriptive logic based. Using logic, we can take machine-to-machine communication into a whole new level. Then there’s the concept of ontology sharing and reuse, so you define the concepts in your domain and relationships between them and publish them for public consumption. Other people can take, extend it, restrict it in ways that XML is unable to do. Now the data model for Semantic Web is called RDF, which looks like a graph that has three components. Subject, predicate and object. So, any data regardless of their types and sources will conform to this graph structure.
Subject
Object
Predicate

18. GRDF GRDF (Geospatial Resource Description Framework)
(0ntology for GeoSpatial Terms)
Adds semantics to data
Loosely-structured (easy to freely mix with other non-geospatial data)
Semantically extensible
ComputerScience
Building
( , )
( , )
hasExtent

19. RDF For the ShapeFile Shape or attribute will be the resource
MultiPolygon
Resource
Coordinates
Property
Value
Value

20. Architecture and Working of Semantic Web Adapter
I/P Read
Shape file
Extra Attributes
to vector
Get
Features
Extra
Attributes
Model
Property
Resource
RDF
Parsing
Storing
Create Model
Create Property
Create Resource
Built on using Java based JENA RDF API
- RDF API.
Reading and writing RDF in RDF/XML, N3 and N-Triples.
-An OWL API.

21. Problems Freely Available Java API for Geo Spatial Data Open Map
Geo Tools
- None of them fully matured.
- Documentation is biggest problem.

22. Result
Sample part of output (for one feature) is shown for the shapefile “zt48_d00.shp” is shown below. The shapefile has these attributes
Shape,
Area,
Perimeter,
zt48_D00_1,
ZCTA,
Name,
LSAD,
LSAD_TRANS.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:j.0= xmlns:rdf=" > <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:Name>79108</j.0:Name> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:area> </j.0:area> </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:zt48_D00_1>50</j.0:zt48_D00_1> </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:perimeter> </j.0:perimeter> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:ZCTA>79108</j.0:ZCTA> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:LSAD_TRANS>5-Digit ZCTA</j.0:LSAD_TRANS> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:hasShape rdf:resource=" </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:LSAD>Z5</j.0:LSAD> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:zt48_D00_>51</j.0:zt48_D00_> </rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=" <j.0:coordinates>MULTIPOLYGON ((( , , ………..)))
</rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF>

23. Potential Application
Shape file
Adaptor
Integrated
Application
Web Services
Plum Modeling Software
City Census
(RDF)

24. YES Conclusion The answer to Research Question:
Is it possible to convert industry standard Geo-Spatial format “Shapefile” into Semantic Web standard format “RDF”?
YES
With the help GeoSemantic Adapter,
First step towards realizing Geo spatial semantic using Shape files leading to GeoSemantic Information.
Will be in a position to tackle interoperability issue.
Dynamic service composition for scenarios involving different file formats can be achieved.

25. Future Research
1. To overcome geospatial data non-interoperability problems, a common template should be designed to convert any file format ranging from GML, .mif (MapInfo),dwg / dxf (AutoCAD) etc to RDF.
2. Presently the adapter is made for web services, this can be made for stand alone applications in the form of libraries/API which can be used a third party tool or middleware, which can even be domain specific.
3. After bringing the various format to RDF there should be a tool to send RDF back into desired format say for example shapefile, GML, mif etc. which will contain all the added features combined into one desired file format.

26. References
[1]. J. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila, “The Semantic Web”, Scientific American, vol. 184, no. 5, pp , 2001.
[2]. D. Fensel and M. Musen, “The Semantic Web: A New Brain for Humanity”, IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 16, no. 1, pp.24-25, 2001.
[3]. Ganesh Subbiah, Ashraful Alam, Dr.Bhavani Thuraisingham “DAGIS Geospatial Semantic Web Services”, Technical Report Submitted to Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas.
[4]. Evren Sirin and Bijan Parsia, “The OWL-S Java API. Poster”, In Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004), Hiroshima, Japan, November 2004.
[5]. Liliana Cabral , John Domingue, Enrico Motta, Terry Payne and Farshad Hakimpour, “Approaches to Semantic Web Services: an Overview and Comaparions”, The Semantic Web: Research and Applications: First European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 3053, pp
[6]. Massimo Paolucci, T Kawamura, T.R. Payne, and K. Sycara, “Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities”, In Proceedings of the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), 2002
[7]. Josh Lieberman, Traverse Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA, Todd Pehle, Northrup Grumman TASC, St. Louis, MO, USA, Mike Dean, BBN Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, “Semantic Evolution of Geospatial Web Services”,
[8]. Dr.Bhavani Thuraisingham, Ganesh Subbiah, Ashraful Alam, Dr. Latifur Khan, “An Integrated Platform for Secure GeoSpatial Information Exchange through the Semantic Web”, ACM Workshop on Secure Web Services (SWS), Nov 2006, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.
[9] M. Goodchild, M. Egenhofer, R. Fegeas, and C. Kottman Eds., “Interoperating Geographic Information Systems”, Kluwer, 1999
[10] A. Vckovski, K. Brassel, and H.-J. Schek Eds. “Interoperating Geographic Information Systems”, Second International Conference, INTEROP'99, Zurich,Switzerland, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1999.
[11].Geo Spirit Search Engine (
[12].Jena Frame Work (