Background

Geodata and geo-webservices can be made discoverable through geo-webportals. Typically, these portals display the service metadata attributes, such as ‘geographic coverage’, ‘creator’ and a service link. However, we often want to know more information at first sight, as a kind of preview of the data and service that we need. Especially, it is important to know the appropriate information on the actual content (data attributes and information types such as ‘building material’, ‘road width’ and ‘water height’). Geo-webportals often provide an overview map and thumbnail previews, but without proper visualization of these data attributes. Current tools from the Semantic Web (Heath and Bizer 2011) make it possible to make these attributes explicit and present them to the end-user.

Tasks

In this research you will first study selected geoportals (e.g., the Dutch National SDI (PDOK) (https://www.pdok.nl/en), the European INSPIRE (geoportal http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/) and the portal of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) (www.geoportal.org/), and identify their strengths and weaknesses in connection with user requirements. Then you will study ways to improve such geoportals with thumbnail previews which disclose the data attributes of the data layers.

Your use case will be based on ongoing work within the Department of Natural Resources. You will use Semantic Web tools to make data attributes explicit and create thumbnail visualisations to present these to the end-user. You will develop a prototype by using existing web tools and perform a usability test on your system. 

Expected results

Your MSc project will result in a tested prototype web application (note that a prototype is a trial application with selected relevant functionality and is purposefully incomplete due to the limited time of the thesis research) and an MSc thesis that reports on the design and implementation of the prototype and recommends developers what to do and what not to do when they want to create semantic previews.

This topic will be conducted in cooperation with the Department of Natural Resources (Valentijn Venus).