Roula Karam

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Papers by Roula Karam

WEB 2013 The First International Conference on Building and Exploring Web Based Environments WEB 2013 Committee WEB Advisory Chairs

WEB 2013 Foreword The First International Conference on Building and Exploring Web Based Environm... more WEB 2013 Foreword The First International Conference on Building and Exploring Web Based Environments [WEB 2013], held between January 27th-February 1st, 2013 in Seville, Spain, was the inaugural conference on web-related theoretical and practical aspects, focusing on identifying challenges for building web-based useful services and applications, and for effectively extracting and integrating knowledge from the Web, enterprise data, and social media. The Web has changed the way we share knowledge, the way we design distributed services and applications, the way we access large volumes of data, and the way we position ourselves with our peers. Successful exploitation of web-based concepts by web communities lies on the integration of traditional data management techniques and semantic information into web-based frameworks and systems. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the WEB 2013 Technical Program Committee, as well as the numerous reviewers. The creati...

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Laurini: " Uncertain GeoInformation Representation and Reasoning: a Use Case

— Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location... more — Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant information to customers anywhere at any time and thus based on their profile and geographical position. However, with the increasing number of heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise related to 1) the interoperability of geographical databases, 2) the integration of geospatial data / metadata of the same location service, provided differently by many operators and 3) the uncertain positioning results due to GPS/Radio coverage technologies, geo coding conversion functions and mobile devices’ limitations. In this paper, the ‘uncertainty ’ issues on geographic, place names and semantic details for homologous objects towards a complete map conflation were solved by our MPLoM framework (Location Integration) and our Visual Domain Ontology application (Cartographic Integration) with an extension of Web Ontology Language name...

Evaluating Reputation in VGI-Enabled Applications

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach to crowdsource information about geospati... more Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is an approach to crowdsource information about geospatial objects around us, as implemented in Open Street Map, Google Map Maker and WikiMapia projects. The value of this content has been recognized by both researchers and organizations for acquiring free, timely and detailed spatial data versus standard spatial data warehouses where objects are created by professionals with variable updating time. However, evaluating its quality and handling its heterogeneity remain challenging concerns. For instance, VGI data sources have been compared to authoritative geospatial ones on specific regions/areas in order to determine an average overall quality level. In user-oriented VGI-based applications, it can be more relevant to assess the quality of particular contents, like specific Points of Interest. In this case, evaluation can be performed indirectly by reputation scores associated with the specific content. This paper focuses on this last aspect....

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A comprehensive reputation assessment framework for volunteered geographic information in crowdsensing applications

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2018

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the result of activities where individuals, supported... more Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the result of activities where individuals, supported by enabling technologies, behave like physical sensors by harvesting and organizing georeferenced content, usually in their surroundings. Both researchers and organizations have recognized the value of VGI content, however this content is typically heterogeneous in quality and spatial coverage. As a consequence, in order for applications to benefit from it, its quality and reliability need to be assessed in advance. This may not be easy since, typically, it is unknown how the process of collecting and organizing the VGI content has been conducted and by whom. In the literature, various proposals focus on an indirect process of quality assessment based on reputation scores. Following this perspective, the present paper provides as main contributions: (i) a multi-layer architecture for VGI which supports a process of reputation evaluation; (ii) a new comprehensive model for computing reputation scores for both VGI data and contributors, based on direct and indirect evaluations expressed by users, and including the concept of data aging; (iii) a variety of experiments evaluating the accuracy of the model. Finally, the relevance of adopting this framework is discussed via an applicative scenario for recommending tourist itineraries.

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Reputation evaluation of georeferenced data for crowd-sensed applications

Procedia Computer Science, 2017

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a process where individuals, supported by enabling te... more Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a process where individuals, supported by enabling technologies, behave like physical sensors to harvest georeferenced content in their surroundings. The value of this, typically heterogeneous, content has been recognized by both researchers and organizations. However, in order to be fruitfully used in various VGI-based types of application reliability and quality of particular VGI content (i.e., Points of Interest) have to be assessed. This evaluation can be based on reputation scores that summarize users' experiences with the specific content. Following this direction, our contribution provides, primarily, a new comprehensive model and a multi-layer architecture for reputation evaluation aimed to assess quality of VGI content. Secondly, we demonstrate the relevance of adopting such a framework through an applicative scenario for recommending touristic itineraries.

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Modeling End-Users as Contributors in Human Computation Applications

Model and Data Engineering, 2012

User models have been defined since the&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;80s, mainly for the ... more User models have been defined since the&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;80s, mainly for the purpose of building context-based, user-adaptive applications. However, the advent of social networked media, serious games, and crowdsourcing platforms calls for a more pervasive notion of user model, capable of representing the multiple facets of a social user, including his social ties, capabilities, activity history, and topical affinities. In this paper, we overview several user models proposed recently to address the platform-independent representation of users ...

Intégration Sémantique et Cartographique des services localisés multifournisseurs

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Services localisés multi-fournisseurs pour le tourisme mobile: un cas d'utilisation pour l'intégration sémantique et cartographique sur des dispositifs portables

Les services géolocalisés (LBS) sont destinés à délivrer de l’information adéquate aux utilisateu... more Les services géolocalisés (LBS) sont destinés à délivrer de l’information adéquate aux utilisateurs quelque soit le temps et l’endroit et ceci en se basant sur leur profil, contexte et position géographique. A travers n’importe quelle application dans ce domaine, par exemple m-tourisme, les utilisateurs souhaitent toujours recevoir une réponse rapide et précise en se déplaçant. Cependant, la qualité de service proposée par les fournisseurs cartographiques actuels (i.e. Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo Maps, Mappy ou Via Michelin) dépend de leurs données géographiques. En général, ces données sont stockées de plusieurs bases de données géographiques (BDG) dans le monde entier. D’autre part, le nombre croissant des différentes BDG couvrant la même zone géographique et la récupération des données/métadonnées non erronées pour un service quelconque, impliquent de nombreux raisonnements et de contrôles d’accès aux BDG afin de résoudre les ambiguïtés dues à la présence des objets homologues dupliqués sur l’écran mobile. Mon travail consiste à permettre cette intégration cartographique pour les applications mtourisme et ceci en récupérant les informations spatiales/non-spatiales (noms, positions géographiques, catégorie du service, détails sémantiques et symboles cartographiques) de plusieurs fournisseurs. Cependant, ceci peut conduire à visualiser des objets dupliqués pour le même point d’intérêt et causer des difficultés au niveau de la gestion des données. En outre, l’utilisateur sera dérouté par la présence de résultats multiples pour un même point. Donc, mon but ultime sera de générer automatiquement une carte unique intégrant plusieurs interfaces des fournisseurs sur laquelle les objets homologues seront intégrés avant de les visualiser sur l’écran mobile. Nos nouveaux concepts, basés sur certains algorithmes de fusion, sur l’ontologie pour assurer l’intégration au niveau sémantique et cartographique, sur l’orchestration des géo web services, sont implémentés dans des prototypes modulaires et évalués.Through any location based services application (LBA) (i.e. m-tourism), users who request information while on the move, intentionally seek as well a quick and precise answer on any map. However, the quality of the cartographic search engines such as Google maps, Bing, Yahoo Maps, Mappy or Via Michelin relies on their geographic datasets. Typically, these datasets had been collected from many geographic databases worldwide. However, the increasing number of different GDBs covering the same area and the retrieval of accurate data/metadata for the requested service will imply lots of reasoning processes and databases’ accesses in order to avoid nearly-duplicated records when displayed on the screen. The scope of my research is to ensure location and cartographic integrations for m-tourism LBA by retrieving spatial/non-spatial information (place names, geographic positions,category type, semantic details and cartographic symbols) from many service providers.However, this will cause many nearly-duplicated records for the same datasets which would bring trouble to data management and make users confused by the different results of a unique query especially for the same point of interest. In other words, my ultimate goal is to generate automatically a unique map from multiple providers’ portrayals such as Google Maps, Bing and Yahoo Maps while homologous features should be integrated to avoid duplicate icons on the mobile screen. Our conceptual framework, based on some fusion algorithms, ontology reasoning for cartographic interoperability and geo-web services orchestration, had been implemented in some modular prototypes and tested for evaluation purpose

Dipt. di Ing. dell'Inf., Univ. of Brescia, Brescia, Italy

Cartographic Integration on mobile devices from several providers LBS by means of map symbol ontology

With the increasing number of geographical data and distributed geospatial applications with hete... more With the increasing number of geographical data and distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise while integrating the details of user's response from many service providers into a unified visual portal on mobile device (i.e. Street View map).Through a conventional point of view, the use of many Location Based Services (LBS) providers will imply several maps, one for each; whereas a cartographic integration will generate a unique map whose components will come from those various LBS providers. For this purpose, spatial domain ontology-driven approach of map symbols will be presented and some selection rules will be given especially based on user's preferences and graphical semiology. To avoid duplicate outputs of homologous objects, issued from many providers, different issues of data/metadata integrations will be studied by using (1) geometric reasoning (based on Euclidian distance), (2) semantic reasoning (based on a feature ontology), (3) place name reasoning (based on a gazetteer or Levenshtein distance), within the framework of belief theory and (4) symbol integration (through the map symbol ontology). This article will present the fusion techniques and the development of a platform named MPLoM (Multi-Providers LBS on Mobile) which is able to support its mobile navigators with personalized preferences and location based services either in push or pull mode. We conclude this paper by advocating the creation of new web services based on multiple providers.

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Integration of Similar Location Based Services Proposed by Several Providers

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2010

Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location B... more Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant information to customers anywhere at any time and thus based on their profile and geographical position. However, with the increasing number of geographical data and distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise related to 1) the interoperability of geographical databases, 2) the integration of geospatial data / metadata of services and 3) the development of user friendly visual portals on mobiles. As many LB standards like OGC and applications were demonstrating the feasibility of portals from a unique provider, the objective of this paper is to pursue further in the approach of generating visual portals by allowing many providers to commercialize their services overlaid on a unique base-map. Furthermore, we have implemented this approach via our prototype MPLoM (Multi-Providers LBS on Mobile Devices).

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Uncertain Geoinformation Representation and Reasoning: A Use Case in LBS Integration

2010 Workshops on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2010

Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location B... more Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant information to customers anywhere at any time and thus based on their profile and geographical position. However, with the increasing number of heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise related to 1) the interoperability of geographical databases, 2) the integration of geospatial data / metadata of the same location service, provided differently by many operators and 3) the uncertain positioning results due to GPS/Radio coverage technologies, geo coding conversion functions and mobile devices' limitations. In this paper, the 'uncertainty' issues on geographic, place names and semantic details for homologous objects towards a complete map conflation were solved by our MPLoM framework (Location Integration) and our Visual Domain Ontology application (Cartographic Integration) with an extension of Web Ontology Language named CartOWL.

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A Crowdsourcing-Based Framework for Improving Geo-spatial Open Data

2013 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2013

ABSTRACT Nowadays, more and more people rely on freely available user-generated spatial content, ... more ABSTRACT Nowadays, more and more people rely on freely available user-generated spatial content, known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Therefore, spatial data creation is no more exclusively in the hands of professionals and Linked Open Data (LOD) techniques have a role in promoting such online and freely accessible spatial information. However, the volume of VGI data is constantly growing so evaluating its quality is a basic need, especially in urban environments where Points of Interest change frequently and human feedbacks are crucial to get frequent updates of their descriptions. In this context, we propose a crowd sourcing-based framework, relying on linked data principles and devised to collect, organize and rank user-generated content in order to improve accuracy and completeness of geo-spatial LOD. To this purpose, metrics have been defined for evaluating both users and contents.

Modeling CrowdSourcing Scenarios in Socially-Enabled Human Computation Applications

Journal on Data Semantics, 2013

ABSTRACT User models have been defined since the 1980s, mainly for the purpose of building contex... more ABSTRACT User models have been defined since the 1980s, mainly for the purpose of building context-based, user-adaptive applications. However, the advent of social networked media, serious games, and crowdsourcing/human computation platforms calls for a more pervasive notion of user model, capable of representing the multiple facets of social users and performers, including their social ties, interests, capabilities, activity history, and topical affinities. In this paper, we define a comprehensive model able to cater for all the aspects relevant for applications involving social networks and human computation; we capitalize on existing social user models and content description models, enhancing them with novel models for human computation and gaming activities representation. Finally, we report on our experiences in adopting the proposed model in the design and implementation of three socially enabled human computation platforms.

Location and Cartographic Integration for Multi-Providers Location Based Services

Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, 2011

Since the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the increasing popularity of mo... more Since the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the increasing popularity of mobile devices, many standardization bodies such as OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) had proposed the implementation of Location Based Services (LBS) applications. Furthermore, map service providers started to use the correspondent devices for visualizing geographic data essentially based on the users' location, his contextual information and his profile. However, many geographic databases (GDBs) could offer slightly different data/metadata for the same requested service. Advanced LBS have to improve interoperability among them. In this paper, we had elaborated many reasoning algorithms and build/match extended geo-ontology framework for the integration of homologous objects on mobile devices. Our approach is illustrated by a tourism LBS case study and could be applied for any geographic domain where position, place name, semantic details and visual aspects' (icon, texture, color, etc.) ambiguities will be integrated automatically through our platform.

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Integrating many legends through ontology for cartographic symbols

Résumé. Plusieurs domaines ont recours aux ontologies comme solution pour présenter, partager et ... more Résumé. Plusieurs domaines ont recours aux ontologies comme solution pour présenter, partager et enrichir leur connaissance à citer le web sémantique, le commerce électronique, l'intelligence artificielle et les systèmes d'information géographiques. Cependant, les concepts et les relations sont identifiés textuellement alors que certains concepts ont un aspect visuel surtout dans le domaine cartographique. Par exemple, le symbole d'un point d'intérêt dans une légende, est identifié comme un concept avec une icône et /ou abréviation, une couleur, une texture, une police de caractère, une orientation ou un certain numéro. Notre approche concerne le développement et l'intégration de ces ontologies visuelles, représentant des légendes, vers une ontologie référence du domaine (fond de carte et symboles provenant de plusieurs fournisseurs). L'objectif de cet article est de 1) proposer un nouveau type d'ontologie dans laquelle les concepts sont visuels et de l&#...

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A Human-Enhanced Framework for Assessing Open Geo-spatial Data

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

With the advent of collaborative Web 2.0, spatial data creation is no more exclusively in the han... more With the advent of collaborative Web 2.0, spatial data creation is no more exclusively in the hands of professionals. For example, linked open data (LOD) promotes a new paradigm for online and freely accessible spatial information. Noteworthy initiatives in this direction are Geonames and OpenStreetMap. Moreover, as cities are continuously changing and growing, Points of Interest (POIs) are no more historical and their descriptions have to be updated frequently. One appropriate solution is to encourage participation of voluntary on-site experts to the process of information gathering and updating. In this context, we propose a human-enhanced framework, based on linked data principles and technologies, and devoted to collect, organize and rank user-generated corrections and completions in order to improve the accuracy and completeness of Geo-spatial LOD. Metrics have been defined for both human contributors and contents in order to estimate their reliability. The generated data introduces an additional linked data layer for hosting the revised version of the original datasets.

Multi-providers location based services for mobile-tourism: a use case for location and cartographic integrations on mobile devices

First of all, my highest gratitude to my PhD main supervisor, distinguished Pr. Robert LAURINI, f... more First of all, my highest gratitude to my PhD main supervisor, distinguished Pr. Robert LAURINI, formerly deputy head of the LIRIS laboratory (Lyon Research Center for Images and Information Systems), formerly vice-president of the INSA board of Regents and currently president of Academics without Borders. I remembered very well as if it was today when we first met on January 28th, 2008 at 08.30 in his office. After discussing the subject and how to start, the last question that came to my mind in that day and eventually the only question that stays in my mind till now: Why had you chosen me for this subject? I had lot of weaknesses but he replied back:-I trust you‖. From that moment, I decided to keep on my promise and never disappoint him despite of all obstacles I had faced. He was not only my thesis supervisor but as well my Godfather to adjust the balance in my thoughts and emotions.

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Improving geo-spatial linked data with the wisdom of the crowds

Proceedings of the Joint EDBT/ICDT 2013 Workshops on - EDBT '13, 2013

Currently, there is more and more interest in geo-spatial data sources providing rich information... more Currently, there is more and more interest in geo-spatial data sources providing rich information about a huge number of interconnected geo-entities and points of interest located in the real world. Moreover, this kind of sources is one of the first to be published as linked open data. Noteworthy examples are the Geonames and GeoLinkedData initiatives. On the one hand, making available more data sources as linked open data allows querying the sources in an integrated way. On the other hand, it is known that content of geo-spatial data sources suffers from various drawbacks, mainly concerning data quality and conflicts. In this context, relevant feedbacks from users with specific experience and knowledge about POIs in a certain spatial region are considered valuable contributions to improve data quality and solve description conflicts. In this context, we propose a conceptual framework called M-PREGeD (Multi-Providers cRowd-Enhanced Geo linked Data) devoted to collect, organize and rank user-generated corrections and completions to improve accuracy and completeness of Geo-spatial Linked Data from different data sources. Metrics have been defined for both contributors and contents. In the framework, validated and ranked corrections and completions are stored as linked open data in a separate repository but linked to the original data sources. The repository can be queried in a combined way with the original data sources.

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Modeling crowdsourcing scenarios in socially-enabled human computation applications

by Roula Karam, Alessandro Bozzon, and Luca Galli

Roula Karam

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