An Ontology-driven Cyberinfrastructure for Intelligent Spatiotemporal Question Answering and Open Knowledge Discovery

Abstract

The proliferation of geospatial data from diverse sources, such as Earth observation satellites, social media, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has created a pressing demand for cross-platform data integration, interoperation, and intelligent data analysis. To address this big data challenge, this paper reports our research in developing a rule-based, semantic-enabled service chain model to support intelligent question answering for leveraging the abundant data and processing resources available online. Four key techniques were developed to achieve this goal: (1) A spatial and temporal reasoner resolves the spatial and temporal information in a given scientific question and enables place-name disambiguation based on support from a gazetteer; (2) a spatial operation ontology categorizes important spatial analysis operations, data types, and data themes, which will be used in automated chain generation; (3) a language-independent chaining rule defines the template for input, spatial operation, and output as well as rules for embedding multiple spatial operations for solving a complex problem; and (4) a recursive algorithm facilitates the generation of executive workflow metadata according to the chaining rules. We implement this service chain model in a cyberinfrastructure for online and reproducible spatial analysis and question answering. Moving the problem-solving environment from a desktop-based environment onto a geospatial cyberinfrastructure (GeoCI) offers better support to collaborative spatial decision-making and ensures science replicability. We expect this work to contribute significantly to the advancement of a reproducible spatial data science and to building the next-generation open knowledge network.