In the last days of July, the second meeting of GeoKnow project took place in Athens. GeoKnow members had the opportunity to meet again after the Leipzig kick-off meeting, discuss the work performed during the first 7 months of the project, as well as fix the next steps. Apart from that, our fellow partners had the chance to strall around some of the most historic and picturesque sites of Athens, like the old and the new parliament buildings, the National University of Athens, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Monastiraki and Plaka quarters and Acropolis, and taste some of the most iconic Greek dishes!
The first part of the meeting focused on performed work. Advances from each Work Package were presented, feeding discussions about (a) integrating currently developed tools, (b) utilizing these tools to manage/process use case datasets and (c) resolving research issues that had come up and enhancing the functionality and efficiency of the developed solutions. All partners agreed that the project advanced significantly since December, as the first tools for managing and processing geospatial, RDF data have been already developed, and very informative reports about the state of the art on geospatial and RDF data management, benchmarking and system requirements have been published as well.
Several discussions, during both meeting days, revolved around the system architecture and, specifically, the GeoKnow Generator (GKG). Concrete decisions were made about the GKG backend that will include a set of loosely integrated components for consuming, processing and exposing geospatial, Linked Data, based on Virtuoso RDF store. We also considered issues regarding user management, GKG’s front end, workflow processing and implementation of gathered system and user requirements.
With respect to geospatial information management, where GeoKnow has already provided solutions for transforming and exposing conventional geospatial data into RDF data (Sparqlify, LinkedGeoData, TripleGeo), all partners agreed that there is the potential to build (based on the work performed in Tasks 2.1 and 1.3) a timely geospatial RDF benchmark, that will be able to test efficiency and functionality capabilities of today’s RDF stores with geospatial support. Also, next steps were discussed, with emphasis on further optimizing the geospatial query capabilities of the underlying RDF store (Virtuoso).
As far as semantic integration of geospatial data is concerned, tools developed within Geoknow for enriching and interlinking geospatial RDF data (GeoLift, LIMES), were, at first, presented to the consortium. These tools triggered further discussions about the fusion and aggregation solutions currently under development and design, as well as how these tools can directly be tested and utilized into processing commercial datasets from the use case partners. Finally, a large part of our discussions was dedicated to quality measures and quality assessment of geospatial data; although these tasks are due to later periods in the project, they are of high importance for all the functionality being built in Work Package 3, since quality indicators of datasets can constitute valuable input for processing such as interlinking and fusion.
After the presentation of (implemented or under development) GeoKnow tools for visualization and authoring of geospatial RDF data, such as Facete, creative ideas were exchanged, discussing both detailed technical implementation solutions and desired functionality for end users. Some important aspects that were considered are the implementation and functionality of spatial authoring, the issue of public and spatial Linked Data co-evolution and the potential for spatial-social networking. Again, the discussions considered the use case scenarios of the project, that is, how the offered functionality can serve commercial and industrial Linked Data management and visualization needs.
In conclusion, during the GeoKnow meeting in Athens all partners exchanged interesting ideas about ongoing and future work and set more concrete objectives to achieve through the next months. We thank all the GeoKnow members for attending and contributing to this constructive meeting!