Unlocking the Power of Geospatial Data: Semantic Information Extraction, Ontology Engineering, and Deep Learning for Knowledge Discovery

Dear Colleagues,

Over recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in digital information resources, including a significant amount of semi-structured data, such as XML files and metadata records, as well as unstructured data, such as scientific reports, news articles, social media, and historical archives. These data include a wealth of information about places, events, phenomena, geospatial concepts, and relations.

Semantic information extraction aims to make this information explicit, enabling computer systems to make sense of the content and facilitate knowledge discovery and organization. Ontological approaches have been acknowledged as crucial for modeling geospatial semantics effectively, addressing semantic inconsistencies, and grounding and linking different conceptualizations. By linking semi-structured and unstructured data to ontologies and knowledge bases, it is possible to enrich the original content with well-defined meaning and support semantic annotation and searches. Semantic analysis and visualization approaches play a significant role in further discovering immanent aspects of these data, such as the historical evolution of cities and the progression of spatiotemporal phenomena and events.

Lately, deep learning algorithms have been used to automatically extract patterns and relationships from large amounts of data, including unstructured and semi-structured data. By combining deep learning approaches with semantic web techniques, such as ontologies and linked data, more powerful and effective intelligent systems can be developed that can reason over large-scale knowledge bases and perform complex tasks, such as event detection, spatial relation extraction, geographic question answering, and knowledge analysis.

The Special Issue focuses on topics related, but not limited, to:

• Geospatial knowledge graphs;
• Ontology design and development;
• User adoption and usability;
• Reasoning and inference;
• Semantic Web;
• Knowledge exploration;
• Semantic visualization;
• Geographic question answering;
• Semantic information extraction;
• Semantic annotation and enrichment;
• Semantic-based search;
• Knowledge analytics.

Prof. Dr. Christos Chalkias
Prof. Dr. Marinos Kavouras
Dr. Margarita Kokla
Prof. Dr. Mara Nikolaidou
Guest Editors

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