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Background Information and Motivation
Geospatial information can be presented as thematic maps, which typically feature a single distribution or relationship over a spatial background to help locate the distribution being mapped (Tyner, 2010). With the advent of the internet, thematic maps that visualise and communicate information about geographic phenomena are now widely published on the Web. A growing demand for thematic maps (Durbha, King, Shah and Youman, 2009) exists since the increase in the collection and availability of thematic data. In Geographic Information Science (GIScience), development of a theme-specific information system requires spatially represented thematic maps (Sagar, 2010). The growth in data has required an increase in the need to better understand the phenomena associated with the data, therefore requiring, new sources of information, and vigorous ability to integrate data (Janowicz et al., 2013). The increasing volumes of available open data and the need to integrate these into cartographic products over the web motivated this research.
Geographic data is defined as ―data with implicit or explicit reference to a location relative to the Earth.‖ (ISO 19109: 2005). Strictly speaking, spatial data refers to any spatial data, not only to data referenced to a location relative to the Earth, i.e. a three-dimensional representation of a teapot is also spatial data. However, in scientific literature ‗geographic data‘, ‗geospatial data‘ and ‗spatial data‘ are typically used interchangeably and this approach is also adopted in this thesis. A web service is described by Papazoglou (2008, p8) as a self-describing, self-contained software unit available through a network (the internet) and capable of completing tasks, solving a problem or to perform a transaction for a user or application. A geospatial web service is a specialised web service that can process spatial data into geospatial information over the web (Shanming and Jianjing, 2008; Breitman, Casanova, and Truszkowski, 2010). A geospatial web service can take advantage of the statistical data available in the linked open data (LOD) cloud to create thematic maps. Visualising the vast amounts of data available in the LOD cloud as thematic maps, offers a powerful spatial analysis tool for planning and decision-making. This could be done by using geospatial web services to integrate linked open data with geometry in a spatial database server. In this thesis, a thematic map that is created by a geospatial web service is referred to as a web thematic map.
Open data refers to data or content free to use, reuse, and redistribute (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness (Open Knowledge, 2014). Increasingly, Government supports open data with the aim to leverage the potential of publicly funded data (UK Government Open Data, 2013; US Government Open Data, 2014; European Environment Agency, 2014). For instance, the principles of linked data (Berners-Lee, 2006) have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers and application developers leading to the creation of the Web of data (Bizer et al., 2009). The Web of data also called the linked open data (LOD) cloud contains enormous data as billions of Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples. The LOD cloud is an example of such a Web of data available as open data over the Web (W3C 2013f; Bizer et al., 2011).
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MOTIVATION
1.2 RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
1.2.1 Problem Statement
1.2.2 Goal of this Research..
1.2.3 Research Objectives
1.2.4 Limitations of the Research .
1.2.5 Significance of the Research
1.3 SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND
1.4 RESEARCH APPROACH
1.5 BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS AND ITS CONTRIBUTIONS
CHAPTER 2: STATE-OF-THE-ART
2.1INTRODUCTION
2.2 CARTOGRAPHY
2.3 STANDARD BASED GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES
2.4 LINKED DATA
2.7 SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURES IN THIS RESEARCH
2.8 RELATED WORK
2.9 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 3: EVALUATION OF TECHNOLOGIES, TOOLS AND STANDARDS RELATED TO OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 OVERVIEW OF THREE OPEN SOURCE WEB MAP SERVERS
3.3 RELATED WORK
3.4 EVALUATION PROCEDURE AND RESULTS
3.5 SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
3.6 CHOICE OF SPATIAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
3.7 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 4: DESIGN OPTIONS FOR GEOSPATIAL THEMATIC WEB SERVICE
4.1 INTRODUCTION
4.2 CONCEPTUALISATION OF GTWS
4.2.1 Utilising Open source Geospatial Software to Access and Integrate Linked Data from the LOD Cloud
4.3 IDENTIFYING REQUIREMENTS
4.4 DESIGN OPTIONS
CHAPTER 5: IMPLEMENTATIONS
5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.2 IMPLEMENTATION OF GTWS-1
5.2.1 Assessing RDF from the LOD Cloud
5.3 IMPLEMENTATION OF GTWS-2: THE MIDDLEWARE
5.4 IMPLEMENTATION OF GTWS-3
CHAPTER 6: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION .
