Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab

The research question of this MSc thesis topic is: “how can we describe and relate  spatio-temporal resources using RDF triples, and publish them as Linked Data?”

The student will explore the existing work, and evaluate different ways for addressing the research question in a case study. The result should include a set of reusable ontology design patterns.

Interested students should contact Tomi Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de).

The task of this MSc thesis is to create a vocabulary for describing and relating  the impressing amount of scientific resources: research settings, data, project reports, publications, people, projects to name a few. Relations having spatial or temporal nature, or relations that are weighted are given a high priority in the thesis work. 

As a material the student will get results of experiments and discussions about essential concepts in science. Student will build the work as an extension/modification of the Linked Science Core Vocabulary. 

Interested students should contact Tomi Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de).

ArgooMap is a map-based discussion forum that has been developed at ifgi for several years in cooperation with our colleagues in Toronto, Canada. The different versions of the tool have been tested in various public participation processes. However, the tool has always been restricted to home-use, which is especially undesirable for use cases where citizens are supposed to provide input for improvements in the city: Ideas for improvement at a certain intersection, such as “clearly mark the crosswalk”, usually come up while the people are on site. The idea of this thesis is therefore to port the ArgooMap code to smartphones, preferably as a platform-independent web app.

Interested students should contact Carsten Keßler.

Efficient environmental monitoring is crucial in order to reduce damages when a natural disaster (e.g. earthquake, flooding, forest fire) occur. To achieve this efficiency environmental organizations need to access multidisciplinary, spatiotemporal data and analyze it for rapid response. Linked Data is an approach to connect, publish and retrieve such data using the Web technologies.

The student will carry on a study on the useful vocabularies for environmental monitoring, and extend them to be used for improving the spatio-temporal linkage of environmental events of interest. The student will also use the developed vocabularies to describe and visualize environmental data.

Interested students should contact Dr. Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de) or Dr. Díaz (laura.diaz [at] uji.es).

The task for this thesis is to create Linked Open Data from historic parcel titles for the city of York, UK. These titles describe land ownership in the city of York. They are available as digital text documents. Place names, person names and spatial relations need to be extracted in order to annotate these documents with semantic descriptions to make them available for further reasoning, e.g. to find out where (on a map) the described parcel is, to analyze ownership changes across several centuries, etc.

Funding for a short-term stay in York is available. This topic is jointly supervised between MUSIL and the history department at University of York. Interested students should contact Carsten Keßler.

Photo CC Michael Lehet

Task: Write a mobile phone app that identifies water bodies (rivers and lakes) in pictures taken from planes. Use vector data from Open Street Map to test which theory of shape produces the best results, independent of orientation and (if possible) scale. 

Interested Students should contact Prof. Kuhn.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is monitored by various systems. However, the problem is that the datasets these systems produce are not fully and explicitly linked. Without links reasoning about the data is hard. Linked Data is an approach to connect and openly publish related data.  

In the Masters/diploma thesis the student will develop and evaluate methods and tools for creating Linked Spatiotemporal Data for the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest.   

Contact: Tomi.Kauppinen (at) uni-muenster.de

Wikipedia pages on places often come with location information, given as coordinates in the top right corner of the page. However, this information is often overly precise, as shown in the example of Berlin given above. The task for this thesis is to develop a bot that automatically lowers the precision of the location information to an appropriate level, depending on the size of the place described on the Wikipedia page. This includes the development of a parser for the place box information to retrieve information about the place’s size (e.g., area, number of inhabitants, etc.).

Interested students should contact Carsten Keßler.

Current POI tags in Open Street Map are based on place categories like “cafe” and “bar”. Such categories do not imply offered functionalities, e.g. “drinking beer”, which account for the “interest” of POIs. For example, “Kaffeehäuser” in Vienna frequently offer beer and therefore functionally overlap with bars, whereas cafes in the US do not sell any alcohol. The thesis should address this problem by developing a method for describing POI based on afforded actions instead of general categories.
Contents:

• Develop a model of different types of actions relevant for a selected domain of POIs, e.g. POIs related to eating and drinking.
• Propose and implement a technical solution (e.g. using RDF) that can be used to annotate and query POIs according to their affordances.

Contact: Simon Scheider.