Timo Homburg, researcher at University of Applied Science, Mainz, and incoming external PhD student at Universität Stuttgart, his advisor, Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab from Universität Stuttgart, and Dr. Daniel Janke, former doctoral researcher of Prof. Staab, had submitted their paper “GeoSPARQL+: Syntax, Semantics and System for Integrated Querying of Graph, Raster and Vector Data” to the 19th International Semantic Web conference.
GeoSPARQL 1.0 is a very successful standard jointly defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and W3C for representing and querying of geospatial data. Core is the intuitive semantic access to complex geospatial data. GeoSPARQL, however, has lacked means to query raster data, thus preventing its uptake for a range of applications. The authors developed their extension GeoSPARQL+ by analysing a range of real-world use cases, deriving novel requirements about the inclusion of raster data, formalizing the syntactic and semantic extension of the GeoSPARQL language, implementing a corresponding system and testing its applicability on analysed use cases. The system is openly available for download.
The authors aim to impact the standardization process of GeoSPARQL 2.0, which is under preparation by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
Among 170 research papers that were submitted to the research track of the 19th International Semantic Web Conference their paper was picked as the best paper with a PhD student as its first author.
Prof. Staab was also extremely happy about the best paper award, which was given to senior researchers Dr. Ronald Denaux and Dr. Jose Manual Gomez-Perez for their paper on “Linked Credibility Reviews for Explainable Misinformation Detection”. Dr. Denaux and Dr. Gomez-Perez from Expert Systems, Spain, are partners in the joint EU project Co-Inform: Co-Creating Misinformation Resilient Societies.