The doctoral dissertations of the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and Aalto University Schools of Technology (CHEM, ELEC, ENG, SCI) published in electronic format are available in the electronic publications archive of Aalto University - Aaltodoc.
Aalto

Methods for Creating and Using Geospatio-Temporal Semantic Web

Tomi Kauppinen

Doctoral dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to be presented with due permission of the Faculty of Information and Natural Sciences for public examination and debate in Auditorium AS2 at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 23rd of April 2010 at 12 noon.

Overview in PDF format (ISBN 978-952-60-3059-3)   [553 KB]
Dissertation is also available in print (ISBN 978-952-60-3058-6)

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the problems and the methods of creating and using ontologies in the area of digital cultural heritage. One of the problems is that 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 annexed or moved to and from other regions. The contribution of this dissertation to this problem is to develop methods which can be used to model, produce and utilize geospatio-temporal ontologies. The resources in geospatio-temporal ontologies can be used as annotation terms for describing content, and also for seeking information. The main point of this dissertation is to describe schemas, models and methods that produce and utilize a geospatio-temporal ontology. The schemas and the models are used as inputs for the methods. These methods generate identifiers for spatio-temporal instances, and also relationships between them. In this work, historical Finnish municipalities were modeled and geospatio-temporal descriptions for them created from a filled-up schema. Methods enriched the models by creating geospatio-temporal relationships between these temporal municipalities. The resulting collection of models are referred to as the Finnish Spatio-temporal Ontology (Suomen ajallinen paikkaontologia, SAPO). Specific relationships of the geo-spatiotemporal instances provided the basis for novel recommendation, data mining and visualization schemes. The results of the experiments were promising. For example, with the help of the ontology a user has the ability to retrieve also the content annotated to a historic region even if she searches using a contemporary name of the same or partially overlapping region. The work contributes also to modeling and reasoning about imprecise temporal intervals. A set of different measures based on analyzing two fuzzy temporal intervals are presented and evaluated in the work. The use of a combination of different measures for calculating relevance between temporal intervals was found out to perform best.

This thesis consists of an overview and of the following 9 publications:

  1. Tomi Kauppinen and Eero Hyvönen. Modeling and Reasoning about Changes in Ontology Time Series. Chapter 11 in Ontologies: A Handbook of Principles, Concepts and Applications in Information Systems, pp. 331-339. Rajiv Kishore, Ram Ramesh, Raj Sharman (editors). ISBN: 0-387-37019-6. Integrated Series in Information Systems, Springer-Verlag, 2007.
  2. Tomi Kauppinen, Jari Väätäinen, and Eero Hyvönen. Creating and Using Geospatial Ontology Time Series in a Semantic Cultural Heritage Portal. In The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference 2008 (ESWC 2008), pp. 110-123, Tenerife, Spain, LNCS 5021, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
  3. Tomi Kauppinen, Riikka Henriksson, Reetta Sinkkilä, Robin Lindroos, Jari Väätäinen and Eero Hyvönen. Ontology-based Disambiguation of Spatiotemporal Locations. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Identity and Reference on the Semantic Web (IRSW2008), Tenerife, Spain, 2008, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073.
  4. Tomi Kauppinen, Kimmo Puputti, Panu Paakkarinen, Heini Kuittinen, Jari Väätäinen and Eero Hyvönen. Learning and Visualizing Cultural Heritage Connections between Places on the Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web (IRMLeS2009), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073.
  5. Tomi Kauppinen, Panu Paakkarinen, Eetu Mäkelä, Heini Kuittinen, Jari Väätäinen, and Eero Hyvönen. Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage. In Digital Culture and E-Tourism: Technologies, Applications and Management Approaches. Miltiadis Lytras, Ernesto Damiani, Lily Diaz and Patricia Ordonez De Pablos (editors), IGI Global, 2010 (accepted for publication).
  6. Tomi Kauppinen, Glauco Mantegari, Panu Paakkarinen, Heini Kuittinen, Eero Hyvönen, and Stefania Bandini. Determining Relevance of Imprecise Temporal Intervals for Cultural Heritage Information Retrieval. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Elsevier, 2010.
  7. Eero Hyvönen, Eetu Mäkelä, Tomi Kauppinen, Olli Alm, Jussi Kurki, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Katri Seppälä, Joeli Takala, Kimmo Puputti, Heini Kuittinen, Kim Viljanen, Jouni Tuominen, Tuomas Palonen, Matias Frosterus, Reetta Sinkkilä, Panu Paakkarinen, Joonas Laitio, and Katariina Nyberg: CultureSampo—Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web 2.0. In Proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2009, Indianapolis, USA, 2009.
  8. Jouni Tuominen, Tomi Kauppinen, Kim Viljanen, and Eero Hyvönen: Ontology-Based Query Expansion Widget for Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web Workshop at the ESWC, Heraklion, Greece, 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073.
  9. Eero Hyvönen, Eetu Mäkelä, Tomi Kauppinen, Olli Alm, Jussi Kurki, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Katri Seppälä, Joeli Takala, Kimmo Puputti, Heini Kuittinen, Kim Viljanen, Jouni Tuominen, Tuomas Palonen, Matias Frosterus, Reetta Sinkkilä, Panu Paakkarinen, Joonas Laitio, Katariina Nyberg: CultureSampo—A National Publication System of Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web 2.0. In The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, Proceedings of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009), pp. 851-856, Heraklion, Greece, Springer-Verlag, 2009.

Errata of publications 1, 3 and 7

Keywords: geoinformation, time, change, ontologies, spatiotemporal reasoning

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Last update 2011-05-26