A semantic based approach to GIS.

The PO-BASyN project

Glauco MANTEGARI
Alessandro MOSCA
Bernardo RONDELLI
Giuseppe VIZZARI
Picture 5

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Outline

Outline

1. The PO-BASyN project: introduction and aims

2. A collaborative platform: the current architecture

3. Towards semantics

4. Quantitative and qualitative reasoning: some ideas for

settlemet dynamics analysis

5. Automatic classification and clustering

6. Conclusions and future developments

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: the context

The main objective of the PO-BASyN project is to investigate the evolutive nature of the
socio-economical trajectories through the study of the bronze age settlement dynamics in
the Padanian Plain

• Geographical and environmental uniformity

and extent of the investigated area: a regional
project involving both the Po Valley and its
surroundings;

• Data richness, both in quantity and quality. A

large number of excavations were conducted
in the area during the last decades and old
investigations were checked and revised. The
scientific literature on these topics is vast.

• A large number of research Institutions is

working on these subjects each year.

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: data types

This particular case study may offer a rich and

qualitatively relevant corpus of heterogeneous
data, including structured and semi-structured
data, documents, images, geo-referred data,
and cartographies. Moreover different
classification models are used and different
analytical and environmental are characterized
by heterogeneous semantics

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: overview

Two main sub-projects that complement each

other:

• to design and to create a system which can

help scholars in collaboratively collecting
and sharing data

• to offer innovative supports for data

analysis and interpretation

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 A collaborative platform: WebGIS

A collaborative platform phase 1: WebGIS

Collaboration of:

• two Departments of Archaeology (Universities of Bologna and Milano Statale)

• a Department of Informatics (from the University of Milano Bicocca.

Three main functional requirements:

•to collect georeferenced data concerning published sites and ceramic findings
•to visualize data in a interactive map
•to perform queries based on textual attributes.

A system based on WebGIS technologies with simple query capabilities.

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 A collaborative platform: towards the geospatial Web

A collaborative platform phase 2: towards the geospatial Web

A second phase started in the middle of year 2007 on the basis of the results obtained
during the first phase and following the most recent developments in web based geospatial
technologies.

Towards the Geospatial Web:, a global geospatial network that does for geodata what the
World Wide Web originally did for textual data, that is make it sharable, searchable and
ubiquitous Gerlek and Fleagle (2007)

• the collaborative facilities of the system have been improved

• development of a support for geospatial web services (WMS and WFS)
• the first steps towards the adoption of standard data formats (GML)
• basic analytical functionalities

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: system architecture

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: the current system architecture

Ceramic types Db
Online database of
ceramics
Digital Library to help users
finding
information about
scientific publications

e-Library
Collaborative
editing
Free and Open Source WebGIS solutions
platform for for the PO-BASyN project
“Free GIS and Archaeology”
Archaeology – April, 5 – 14:00
researchers
and
students

Sites Db
Online
database of
WebGIS for the Bronze Age
Bronze Age sites sites in northern Italy
in northern Italy Web GIS

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: towards semantics

The technological platform we developed until now fullfills the most part of the initial
requirements for the creation of a collaborative system for data collection

This is not sufficient in order to move towards

the development of innovative supports for data
analysis and interpretation

Semantically enabling our system and using

qualitative Knowledge Representation and
reasoning techniques are crucial to this point

1) semantic support:
• to better integrate data coming from the
different sources
• to provide innovative access, navigation and
query of the dataset
1) qualitative Knowledge Representation and reasoning:
• to provide new functionalities for data analysis and
interpretation that integrated or maybe go beyond the
quantitative based approach commonly exploited by
GIS systems

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008
 The PO-BASyN project: towards semantics

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

• SPARQL Query Interface
• predefined queries
• custom query form

Web-based semantic framework

Query interface SPARQL (query, inference)
user
NavEditOW Sesame, Jena, ...

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Semantic & Entity

• The “entities”
georeferenced in the GIS
have a value which
depends on the thing they
represent

• Each “entity” is defined

and interpreted in function
of the entities which
constitute it and in
function of both
quantitative and
ontological considerations

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Settlement Dynamics

2000 a.C.

1500 a.C.

1200 a.C.

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Qualitative & Quantitative Reasoning

Classification
G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008
Epistemic Dimensions of an artefacts

How to Represent (Human Knowledge on) Artefact

Structural-Mereological dimension
(Part-Part and Part-Whole relations)

• Stylistic-Morphological dimension
• Quantitative dimension
(Rim Diameter,
Lip Thickness,
Height,... )

Chemical-physical dimension
(Uranium-Series Dating,
Optical Dating,
Radiocarbon Dating,...
 Archaeometry)

• Spatial dimension
• Temporal dimension
• Teleological dimension
G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008
Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming

• Unlike Prolog, A-Prolog has well-defined declarative semantics for nonmonotonic features
(e.g. "negation as failure") independent of a particular inference mechanism. Unlike the ‘original’
nonmonotonic logics they are not super-classical. A-Prolog uses a collection of new connectives
which are often more suitable for representing various forms of nonmathematical knowledge than
their classical counterparts.

• A-Prolog is a logic programming language based on answer sets/stable model semantics.

• A program of A-Prolog (also called Answer Set Programming) is a pair {σ,Π} where σ is a
signature and Π is a collection of rules and facts.

W. Faber, N. Leone, G. Pfeifer

Experimenting with heuristics for answer set programming
in: Proc. IJCAI-01, Seattle, WA, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 2001, pp. 635–640.

T. Eiter, N. Leone, C. Mateis, G. Pfeifer, F. Scarcello

A deductive system for nonmonotonic reasoning
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1265, Springer, Dagstuhl, 1997, pp. 363–374.

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Automatic Classification

..able to support the automatic computation of

“matching values” on the basis of analogical
reasoning performed along epistemic
dimensions.
(Falkenheimer, Forbus, and Gentner (1989) - Analogy as the recognition that "one thing is like another" if there is a mapping from a
conceptual structure that describes the first one to a conceptual structure that describes the second).

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 facts
db

txt
Automated
axioms
Classification & DLV
rules
txt

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

From Artefact Classification to Clustering

Local
Artefact Classification
Spatial Integration

Intra-Site Landscape
Spatial Distribution Distribution

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 The PO-BASyN project: towards qualitative reasoning

Intra-cluster Settlement Pattern

Analysis
Our aim:

• verify in this way if consolidated

classificatory and typological models are
valid
• we can support new complex inferences,
that not only take into account more
variables, but which take into account
qualitative variables
Analysis of the Interactions

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Challenge: the geography of locations, not relations

While complexity science has certainly had

a major influence on our approach, we
believe that some of the problems with
spatial analysis can actually be worked
through at a more basic level. A
fundamental problem is one of emphasis –
in much spatial analysis, even in the more
sophisticated forms of GIS, interactions
between points are seen as secondary to
the existence of those points.

after Evans et al.2007

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

Conclusion & Future Works

Integration of the above experiences in the system to

enrich, enhance, and improve its functionalities.

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008

 glauco.mantegari@disco.unimib.it alessandro.mosca@disco.unimib.it

bernardo.rondelli@disco.unimib.it giuseppe.vizzari@disco.unimib.it

http://www.archeoserver.it/pobasyn/home/index.php

G. Mantegari, A. Mosca, B. Rondelli, G. Vizzari CAA Budapest 2-6 April 2008