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A special issue of ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (ISSN 2220-9964).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 51292

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Mohsen Kalantari

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Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration, Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Interests: land administration; digital twin; spatial data infrastructure; geospatial standards
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Abbas Rajabifard

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Guest Editor

Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration, Melbourne School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
Interests: digital twin; land administration; cadastre; spatial data infrastructure
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Jacynthe Pouliot

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Guest Editor

Vice Dean Research, Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics, Université Laval, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada
Interests: 3D modeling; application in 3D cadastre; integration of geospatial data; geospatial information system; 3D visualisation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Spatial metadata are a critical part of spatial data infrastructure by which custodians and users of spatial data organise and access the data. Records of spatial metadata are created by custodians, following national and international standards. While spatial metadata have served the needs of custodians well in terms of data organisation, it is always argued that users do not find the records useful due to several reasons, such the content, organisation of records, user-friendliness, and fitness for purpose. There is a knowledge gap in how spatial metadata systems should evolve so that users have a better experience with the records. This Special Issue invites researchers and practitioners to submit original work on user-focused spatial metadata systems. We accept a wide range of contributions, such as metadata data issues relevant to user requirement analysis, user metadata interaction, metadata standards, data and metadata modeling, data catalogues, metadata for 3D and 4D spatial data, spatial metadata 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. We welcome submissions from diverse disciplines, including urban planning, public safety, geographic information science, Human–Computer Interaction, Internet of Things, Big Data, and others.

Dr. Mohsen Kalantari
Dr. Abbas Rajabifard
Prof. Jacynthe Pouliot
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Spatial metadata
Human–computer interaction
Data Quality assessment
Data Quality report
Standardisation
Data catalogue
SDI
GIS
Fit-for-purpose
Usability

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Published Papers (12 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 539 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceArticle

Approaches for the Clustering of Geographic Metadata and the Automatic Detection of Quasi-Spatial Dataset Series

by Javier Lacasta, Francisco Javier Lopez-Pellicer, Javier Zarazaga-Soria, Rubén Béjar and Javier Nogueras-Iso

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2022, 11(2), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi11020087 - 26 Jan 2022

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3214

Abstract

The discrete representation of resources in geospatial catalogues affects their information retrieval performance. The performance could be improved by using automatically generated clusters of related resources, which we name quasi-spatial dataset series. This work evaluates whether a clustering process can create quasi-spatial dataset series using only textual information from metadata elements. We assess the combination of different kinds of text cleaning approaches, word and sentence-embeddings representations (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, ELMo, Sentence BERT, and Universal Sentence Encoder), and clustering techniques (K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, and agglomerative clustering) for the task. The results demonstrate that combining word-embeddings representations with an agglomerative-based clustering creates better quasi-spatial dataset series than the other approaches. In addition, we have found that the ELMo representation with agglomerative clustering produces good results without any preprocessing step for text cleaning. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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21 pages, 347 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Problem of Reference Rot in Spatial Metadata Catalogues

by Sergio Martin-Segura, Francisco Javier Lopez-Pellicer, Javier Nogueras-Iso, Javier Lacasta and Francisco Javier Zarazaga-Soria

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2022, 11(1), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi11010027 - 31 Dec 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2824

Abstract

The content at the end of any hyperlink is subject to two phenomena: the link may break (Link Rot) or the content at the end of the link may no longer be the same as it was when it was created (Content Drift). Reference Rot denotes the combination of both effects. Spatial metadata records rely on hyperlinks for indicating the location of the resources they describe. Therefore, they are also subject to Reference Rot. This paper evaluates the presence of Reference Rot and its impact on the 22,738 distribution URIs of 18,054 metadata records from 26 European INSPIRE spatial data catalogues. Our Link Rot checking method detects broken links while considering the specific requirements of spatial data services. Our Content Drift checking method uses the data format as an indicator. It compares the data formats declared in the metadata with the actual data types returned by the hyperlinks. Findings show that

10.41 %

of the distribution URIs suffer from Link Rot and at least

6.21 %

of records suffer from Content Drift (do not declare its distribution types correctly). Additionally,

14.94 %

of metadata records only contain intermediate HTML web pages as distribution URIs and

31.37 %

contain at least one HTML web page; thus, they cannot be accessed or checked directly. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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23 pages, 8065 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Synchronising Spatial Metadata Records and Interfaces to Improve the Usability of Metadata Systems

by Mohsen Kalantari, Syahrudin Syahrudin, Abbas Rajabifard and Hannah Hubbard

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10(6), 393; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10060393 - 7 Jun 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2433

Abstract

The spatial data infrastructure literature reveals significant gaps in metadata systems concerning their efficiency and effectiveness for end-users. The literature proposes improvements to make the metadata systems more user-friendly. These improvements include new metadata elements and user interfaces that are in concert with each other. In this paper, we implement the proposed improvements in a prototype system and engage with end-users to assess if the proposals help users’ expectations. The prototype is evaluated by conducting think-aloud protocol (TAP) usability testing and semi-structured interviews with end-users. The result demonstrates an increased level of satisfaction about existing systems and some more areas to improve. We conclude that a synchronised development approach for the spatial metadata and the user interface will increase the usability of the metadata for data discovery and selection. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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18 pages, 291 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Proposal for a User-Oriented Spatial Metadata Profile

by Mohsen Kalantari, Syahrudin Syahrudin, Abbas Rajabifard and Hannah Hubbard

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10(6), 376; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10060376 - 2 Jun 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2651

Abstract

Spatial metadata profiles have been designed and evolved by data custodians to manage, share, discover, and use spatial data. The end-users of spatial data often do not have much input in designing the profiles. The spatial data infrastructure literature reveals that they question the usability of spatial metadata. This paper analyzes the usability of metadata profiles by engaging end-users and clarifying their requirements in response to this problem. Over 60 users from 18 countries were engaged using an online survey based on a purposive sampling method. The results show that the most widely used metadata standard, ISO 19115, provides metadata elements to accommodate most user requirements for searches. However, an extension to the standard is necessary to assist users in discovery and selection. Two new metadata elements are proposed as part of the extension. The extension also involves changing the obligation type of existing elements to improve data discovery. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

27 pages, 5960 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Geospatial User Feedback: How to Raise Users’ Voices and Collectively Build Knowledge at the Same Time

by Alaitz Zabala, Joan Masó, Lucy Bastin, Gregory Giuliani and Xavier Pons

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10(3), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10030141 - 5 Mar 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2982

Abstract

Geospatial data is used not only to contemplate reality but also, in combination with analytical tools, to generate new information that requires interpretation. In this process data users gain knowledge about the data and its limitations (the user side of data quality) as well as knowledge on the status and evolutions of the studied phenomena. Knowledge can be annotations on top of the data, responses to questions, a careful description of the processes applied, a piece of software code or scripts applied to the data, usage reports or a complete scientific paper. This paper proposes an extension of the current Open Geospatial Consortium standard for Geospatial User Feedback to include the required knowledge elements, and a practical implementation. The system can incrementally collect, store, and communicate knowledge elements created by users of the data and keep them linked to the original data by means of permanent data identifiers. The system implements a Web API to manage feedback items as a frontend to a database. The paper demonstrates how a JavaScript widget accessing this API as a client can be easily integrated into existing data catalogues, such as the ECOPotential web service or the GEOEssential data catalogue, to collectively collect and share knowledge. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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23 pages, 6413 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceArticle

Geospatial Queries on Data Collection Using a Common Provenance Model

by Guillem Closa, Joan Masó, Núria Julià and Xavier Pons

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10(3), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10030139 - 5 Mar 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2835

Abstract

Lineage information is the part of the metadata that describes “what”, “when”, “who”, “how”, and “where” geospatial data were generated. If it is well-presented and queryable, lineage becomes very useful information for inferring data quality, tracing error sources and increasing trust in geospatial information. In addition, if the lineage of a collection of datasets can be related and presented together, datasets, process chains, and methodologies can be compared. This paper proposes extending process step lineage descriptions into four explicit levels of abstraction (process run, tool, algorithm and functionality). Including functionalities and algorithm descriptions as a part of lineage provides high-level information that is independent from the details of the software used. Therefore, it is possible to transform lineage metadata that is initially documenting specific processing steps into a reusable workflow that describes a set of operations as a processing chain. This paper presents a system that provides lineage information as a service in a distributed environment. The system is complemented by an integrated provenance web application that is capable of visualizing and querying a provenance graph that is composed by the lineage of a collection of datasets. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19115 standards family with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provenance initiative (W3C PROV) were combined in order to integrate provenance of a collection of datasets. To represent lineage elements, the ISO 19115-2 lineage class names were chosen, because they express the names of the geospatial objects that are involved more precisely. The relationship naming conventions of W3C PROV are used to represent relationships among these elements. The elements and relationships are presented in a queryable graph. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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17 pages, 474 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Geospatial Open Data Usage and Metadata Quality

by Alfonso Quarati, Monica De Martino and Sergio Rosim

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10(1), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10010030 - 13 Jan 2021

Cited by 27 | Viewed by 4566

Abstract

The Open Government Data portals (OGD), thanks to the presence of thousands of geo-referenced datasets, containing spatial information are of extreme interest for any analysis or process relating to the territory. For this to happen, users must be enabled to access these datasets and reuse them. An element often considered as hindering the full dissemination of OGD data is the quality of their metadata. Starting from an experimental investigation conducted on over 160,000 geospatial datasets belonging to six national and international OGD portals, this work has as its first objective to provide an overview of the usage of these portals measured in terms of datasets views and downloads. Furthermore, to assess the possible influence of the quality of the metadata on the use of geospatial datasets, an assessment of the metadata for each dataset was carried out, and the correlation between these two variables was measured. The results obtained showed a significant underutilization of geospatial datasets and a generally poor quality of their metadata. In addition, a weak correlation was found between the use and quality of the metadata, not such as to assert with certainty that the latter is a determining factor of the former. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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21 pages, 1492 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Spatial Metadata Usability Evaluation

by Mohsen Kalantari, Syahrudin Syahrudin, Abbas Rajabifard, Hardi Subagyo and Hannah Hubbard

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9(7), 463; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9070463 - 21 Jul 2020

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3730

Abstract

Spatial metadata is a critical part of any spatial data infrastructure, which enables the organising, sharing, discovery and use of spatial data. This paper highlights a knowledge gap in the usability of the metadata systems for the end–users. It then addresses the gap by applying the User Centred Design approach to investigate the usability of metadata records. The research engages with end–users concerning efficiency and effectiveness of metadata systems, and end–users’ satisfaction and expectations. The results indicate significant gaps with the effectiveness and efficiency of metadata systems for spatial data discovery and selection. Inconsistency and irrelevant information in the metadata records were found in the title, keywords, abstracts, data quality and other elements of the metadata. Additionally, essential improvements were identified for user interfaces. Discouraging presentation of the metadata is a prominent problem found in the interface of the metadata systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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22 pages, 5935 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Exploiting the Potential of VGI Metadata to Develop A Data-Driven Framework for Predicting User’s Proficiency in OpenStreetMap Context

by Gangothri Rajaram and KR Manjula

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8(11), 492; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8110492 - 31 Oct 2019

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3984

Abstract

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) encourages citizens to contribute geographic data voluntarily that helps to enhance geospatial databases. VGI’s significant limitations are trustworthiness and reliability concerning data quality due to the anonymity of data contributors. We propose a data-driven model to address these issues on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a particular case of VGI in recent times. This research examines the hypothesis of evaluating the proficiency of the contributor to assess the credibility of the data contributed. The proposed framework consists of two phases, namely, an exploratory data analysis phase and a learning phase. The former explores OSM data history to perform feature selection, resulting in “OSM Metadata” summarized using principal component analysis. The latter combines unsupervised and supervised learning through K-means for user-clustering and multi-class logistic regression for user classification. We identified five major classes representing user-proficiency levels based on contribution behavior in this study. We tested the framework with India OSM data history, where 17% of users are key contributors, and 27% are unexperienced local users. The results for classifying new users are satisfactory with 95.5% accuracy. Our conclusions recognize the potential of OSM metadata to illustrate the user’s contribution behavior without the knowledge of the user’s profile information. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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25 pages, 1629 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Semantic Profiles for Easing SensorML Description: Review and Proposal

by Paolo Tagliolato, Cristiano Fugazza, Alessandro Oggioni and Paola Carrara

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8(8), 340; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8080340 - 31 Jul 2019

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3755

Abstract

The adoption of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) practices by sensor maintainers is hampered by the inherent complexity of the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), its high expressiveness, and the scarce availability of editing tools. To overcome these issues, the Earth Observation (EO) community often recurs to SensorML profiles narrowing the range of admitted metadata structures and value ranges. Unfortunately, profiles frequently fall short of providing usable editing tools and comprehensive validation criteria, particularly for the difficulty of checking value ranges in the multi-tenanted domain of the Web of Data. In this paper, we provide an updated review of current practices, techniques, and tools for editing SensorML in the perspective of profile support and introduce our solution for effective profile definition. Beside allowing for formalization of a broad range of constraints that concur in defining a metadata profile, our proposal closes the gap between profile definition and actual editing of the corresponding metadata by allowing for ex-ante validation of the metadata that is produced. On this basis, we suggest the notion of Semantic Web SensorML profiles, characterized by a new family of constraints involving Semantic Web sources. We also discuss implementation of SensorML profiles with our tool and pinpoint the benefits with respect to the existing ex-post validation facilities provided by schema definition languages. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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17 pages, 4560 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Remote Diagnosis of Architectural Heritage Based on 5W1H Model-Based Metadata in Virtual Reality

by Jongwook Lee, Junki Kim, Jaehong Ahn and Woontack Woo

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8(8), 339; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8080339 - 30 Jul 2019

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 6939

Abstract

We propose a framework based on the 5W1H model-based metadata for remote diagnosis in virtual reality (VR). For this purpose, we suggest unique metadata composed of Point of Interest (POI)-extended anchor (xAnchor)-content for a context-aware service in virtual and augmented reality. We define the attributes of the metadata based on the 5W1H context for information retrieval according to the context in a remote diagnosis. Second, we propose the ontology-based linker metadata that express the relations between AR scenes and that retrieve external information. Moreover, we suggest heritage building information metadata for information retrieval according to context. For evaluation, we created a geo-tagged content tool and a remote diagnosis VR application. We conducted focus-group interviews and heuristic evaluations for remote diagnosis in VR to verify the methodology of this study. As a result, we found that experts were most satisfied with the functions that provide the contextualized information. This study contributes to the geospatial metadata for a context-aware service in VR/AR as well as the remote diagnosis framework to overcome the time-consuming problem of the existing remote diagnosis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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39 pages, 4638 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Geographic Information Metadata—An Outlook from the International Standardization Perspective

by Jean Brodeur, Serena Coetzee, David Danko, Stéphane Garcia and Jan Hjelmager

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8(6), 280; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8060280 - 15 Jun 2019

Cited by 29 | Viewed by 8284

Abstract

Geographic information metadata provides a detailed description of geographic information resources. Well before digital data emerged, metadata were shown in the margins of paper maps to inform the reader of the name of the map, the scale, the orientation of the magnetic North, the projection used, the coordinate systems, the legend, and so on. Metadata were used to communicate practical information for the proper use of maps. When geographic information entered the digital era with geographic information systems, metadata was also collected digitally to describe datasets and the dataset collections for various purposes. Initially, metadata were collected and saved in digital files by data producers for their own specific needs. The sharing of geographic datasets that required producers to provide metadata with the dataset to guide proper use of the dataset—map scale, data sources, extent, datum, coordinate reference system, etc. Because of issues with sharing and no common understanding of metadata requirements, the need for metadata standardization was recognized by the geographic information community worldwide. The ISO technical committee 211 was created in 1994 with the scope of standardization in the field of digital geographic information to support interoperability. In the early years of the committee, standardization of metadata was initiated for different purposes, which culminated in the ISO 19115:2003 standard. Now, there are many ISO Geographic information standards that covers the various aspect of geographic information metadata. This paper traces an illustration of the development and evolution of the requirements and international standardization activities of geographic information metadata standards, profiles and resources, and how these attest to facilitating the discovery, evaluation, and appropriate use of geographic information in various contexts. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geospatial Metadata)

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