Active and Completed Research Projects

TALOS - Task aware location based services for mobile environments (2008-2010)

TALOS is a project that will provide the technological foundations for the task-aware supply of rich content in mobile LBS environments. Despite the growth in the number of mobile users, the wide-spread adoption of ubiquitous wireless networks, and the ever increasing capabilities of mobile handsets, the market of mobile services is still dominated by simple infotainment services. This is especially apparent in the area of Location Based Systems, which with few exceptions (e.g. navigation), have not fulfilled its predicted commercial success in mobile environments. Some reasons here are that (i) content offered in typical LBS applications is still narrow and static (ii) available methods and interfaces in mobile handsets for the discovery of available content are at best insufficient (e.g. keyword type search) and (iii) mobile users still require a GPS module (integrated or autonomous) to utilize location based services and (iv) existing structured content available in several LBS applications is hard to reuse. The scope of the project is to address the above problems to the benefit of the participating SMEs, offering them a clear S&T advantage over their competition, enabling them to deliver commercially successful location based services for mobile environments. In particular,

Furthermore, in order to enrich the available content in mobile LBS, we will develop:

Connected Projects

IMIS Researchers participating in projects hosted at other organizations.

GEOCROWD - Creating a Geospatial Knowledge World (2010-2014)

The goal of “GEOCROWD – Creating a Geospatial Knowledge World” is to establish a fertile research environment by means of a training network that will promote the GeoWeb 2.0 vision and advance the state of the art in collecting, storing, analyzing, processing, reconciling, and making large amounts of semantically rich user-generated geospatial information available on the Web. Specifically, activities will focus on

GeoWeb 2.0 is the geographic embodiment of the Web 2.0 moniker for the next generation Web, i.e., the next generation of geographic information publishing, discovery and use. With the proliferation of the Internet as the primary medium for data publishing and information exchange, we have seen an explosion in the amount of online content available on the Web. A large portion of this content is being made available by individuals as User-Generated Content (UGC). The objective of GEOCROWD is nothing less than training a new generation of scientists with respect to taming this geodata tsunami and addressing the challenge of transforming the data into meaningful chunks of information obtained with simplicity and speed comparable to that of Web-based search.

The aim is to mobilize and integrate premier European research groups with expertise in related areas, fostering collaborations among them, and instituting formal instruments of research interactions and educational programs, thereby ultimately incubating a new research community. GEOCROWD comes at a crucial time: our ability to generate geospatial data has increased to unprecedented levels (with respect to both their size and rate), the wealth of information that can be derived from user-contributed content is extremely high, but our ability to make this valuable information actionable for the benefits of science, business, or our everyday lives is hindered by the algorithmic, computational as well as semantic complexity of the required data and information processing. Consortium members have been extensively involved in research in several problems that are fundamental to managing the geospatial information. GEOCROWD represents a natural follow-up to their earlier work, will consolidate and align their currently diverse plans to pursue further relevant research. Its outreach activities will increase the ability of the research community and academia to transfer their research results to industry and influence the development of competitive sophisticated stream management systems.

The project will also build a qualified, trans-European Intelligent Geospatial Information Management research community, whose members will be inspired by common use cases and will share experiences, plan, innovate, and reach out together, with strong commitment to tackle the main relevant technical challenges.

In conclusion, GEOCROWD seeks to achieve the following: