Ontology Based Quality Assuranc e for Mobile Data Acquisition

Abstract

Mobile data acquisition provides a new chance for the fieldwork in geosciences. In this respect, advances in ICT are enabling effective and efficient access to and acquisition of geodata in field. Within the project “Advancement of Geoservices” a mobile data acquisition system has been built up based on OGC’s Transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T) and extensions. Therewith using this system mobile field workers can not only have interoperable access to heterogeneous databases in the field, but also use transaction operations like inserting, deleting and updating data. The acquisition system is generic and can be easily adapted to different geosciences applications. The direct transfer of newly collected data into databases requires data quality assurance directly in the field. In the project mentioned above, the overall data quality assurance procedure has been investigated. In this paper, we focus on one part of this procedure, which addresses the question how ontology-based rules can be incorporated to consider user defined quality constraints. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), a member submission of W3C is used to define the data quality constraints. Mobile geocomputing and quality checking tools have been created and integrated into the mobile data acquisition workflow. These tools can simultaneously check the data measured or entered by field workers against the defined ontology-based data quality constraints. Therefore the inconsistencies between collected data and data model can be avoided at an early stage. Mobile field workers can benefit from the proposed way in many aspects, which are presented in this paper.