Quality of information about the real, geographical world is always imperfect : due to imprecise or incomplete observations, and biased or vague interpretations. Therefore uncertainty hampers any decision, and this has a cost !
REVIGIS picture
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this is an IST-FET project (2000-2004)
REVIGIS picture		 The general objective of the European project is:
    - To improve awareness and control on data quality, based on sharable concepts;
    - To revise information, by restoring consistency, for better decision making.

The approach is to introduce more "intelligence" in GIS:
    - To clearly identify which knowledge is required by each real application: goal(s), features,
    objects, constraints and rules, limit of use ('ontological approach');
    - To use all available knowledge (metadata, ancillary documents, etc.);
    - To use robust representations, to reveal inconsistencies, to track conflicts, to offer a "reasonable" revision.

Project goal:
   - To experiment on a range of cases: flooding, coast erosion, urban planning, landcover;
  - To perform an 'ontological' study of each of these applications;
  - To develop specific formalisms and algorithms; to apply them to these cases;
  - To establish a long-term synergy for European skills in advanced GIS research;
  - To promote the intellectual property of the project in the field of information quality.

Main results:

  • Original bi-ontology approach, to overcome the issue of internal/external quality (producer's .vs. user's view), applied to difficult cases: multiply defined, or dynamic, or vague geographical features. Geographic information producers and users, can profit both to the conceptual breakthroughs of the project: logical monitoring of map specifications, pyramidal method for user concepts, legal aspects awareness, semantical approach of land classes, etc.
  • Several logical tools are developed, implemented, and successfully applied:
  • propositional based revision with removed-sets algorithms, for general case;
  • revision of pre-ordered beliefs, for multi-criteria cases ... more >>
  • linear-constraint based revision suitable for propagation cases (flows, traffic, etc.) ... more >>
  • concept lattices for fusion of class hierarchies, and multiply defined datasets;
  • fuzzy representation for a variety of spatial features, and ontology for these;
  • demonstration of most of these on a prototype, in a 'mediation' architecture aware of most recent standards: W3C-XML family (incl. GML, OWL), ISO19100- family;
  • A Europe wide academic network now exists, in link with major actors of the domain: mapping agencies, environmental institutes, SMEs in services or software publishing.
  • Overall outcome: 15 PhD defended between 2000 and 2006; 150 academic publications (2000-2005), a dozen specialised meetings, 6 special sessions in regular Conferences (ISSDQ, ESQARU, SDH), two Journal special issues, ...