Preface: semantic and conceptual issues in geographic information systems

Recent advances in information technologies have increased the production, collection, and diffusion of geographical data, thus favoring the design and development of geographic information systems (GIS). Nowadays, GIS are emerging as a common information infrastructure that penetrate into more and more aspects of our society. This has given rise to new methodological and data engineering challenges in order to accommodate new users’ requirements for new applications. Conceptual and semantic modeling are ideal candidates to contribute to the development of the next generation of GIS solutions. They allow to elicit and capture user requirements as well as the semantics of a wide domain of applications. The series of International Workshops on Semantic and Conceptual Issues in Geographic Information Systems (SeCoGIS) is intended to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in geographic information systems. The selected papers of this special issue are extended versions of papers presented at the 3 International SeCoGIS workshop held in Barcelona in November 2008, in conjunction with the 27 Conceptual Modeling Conference (ER). The first paper of this special issue is entitled “Managing sensor traffic data and forecasting unusual behavior propagation” and is co-authored by C. B. Medeiros, M. Joliveau, G. Jomier, and F. De Vuyst. The authors introduce a complete framework for the integration of sensor data in the context of intelligent transportation systems, an emerging challenging area for applications of real-time GIS. The paper develops a data integration strategy for summarizing and filtering incoming sensor-based data. The second component of the contribution develops several querying and analysis strategies at different levels of granularity in space and time, thus facilitating the derivation of unusual patterns and behaviors. The whole approach has the advantage of being tested in real contexts. The second paper, entitled “Exploiting geographic references of documents in a geographical information retrieval system using an ontology-based index” and written by N. R. Brisaboa, M. R. Luaces, A. S. Places, and D. Seco, presents a geographical dataretrieval approach that relies on an ontology-based index structure. The index structure combines spatial, textual, and ontology criteria. The advantage of this approach is that the semantics contained within an ontological representation of a given geographical database can facilitate retrieval procedures when searching for some items of semantic and Geoinformatica (2010) 14:277–278 DOI 10.1007/s10707-009-0101-8