A SOA-Based Module for the Production of Geo-Summaries

The authors present in this paper the functionalities of the Metadata Retrieval (MDR) module, a software component developed to enrich the information content of a system controlling a fleet of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) by means of annotations on locations provided by Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects. MDR, developed in the context of an overall project based on SOA architecture, adds updated information to the system via Web Services provided by OpenStreetMap and GeoNames. Furthermore, MDR can be applied for the acquisition and the integration of users' spatial annotations and use them in any way to produce, illustrate and enhance geo-summaries. Actually MDR performs the content characterization of a spatial area by means of a filter that selects the statistically significant annotations whose frequency in the area is in contrast with the surrounding.