GIS and Remote Sensing

In the last few years, with the rise of the open data movement, a large and increasing number of governments and organizations have started to make information freely available and easily accessible online. In order to increase transparency, the information is also published as Linked Open Data. From the government systems perspective, the Linked Data approach can be observed as a technique for making the data interoperable and ready for consumption. In order to harmonize approaches used for describing the datasets, semantic services or repositories, the European Commission, in collaboration with the W3C consortium, has accepted a set of standard vocabularies that should be used to build public administration services. This presentation aims to discuss the challenges related to managing spatial and temporal information in Linked Data format and introduce the opportunities in terms of data aggregation/integration and creation of information mashups and decision-support tools on top of Linked Data. Being relatively a new field, currently there is a lack of tools that enable efficient exploration and analysis of linked geospatial statistical datasets. Therefore, ESTA-LD (Exploratory Spatio-Temporal Analysis) tool was developed to address some of the Linked statistical Data management issues, such as crossing the statistical and the geographical dimensions, producing statistical maps, visualizing different measures, and comparing statistical indicators of different regions through time. The modeling approach that was adopted so that the published data conform to the established standards for representing statistical, spatial and temporal data in Linked Data format will be also introduced. The main contribution of the research is related to the delivery of state-of-the-art open-source tools for retrieving, quality assessment, exploration and analysis of statistical Linked Data that is made available through a SPARQL endpoint.