Prof. Manolis Koubarakis from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, was visiting the SDA group on the 21st of September 2017.
Manolis Koubarakis with his research group of Management of Data, Information & Knowledge has been working the last 7 years on managing geospatial data and has contributed to various research projects and applications on this domain. Examples of successful projects include LEO: Linked Earth Observation Data and MELODIES: Maximizing the Exploitation of Linked Open Data in Enterprise and Science, and some of their applications, widely used by the research community, are Strabon (spatiotemporal RDF store) and SEXTANT (web-based platform for visualizing, exploring and interacting with time-evolving linked geospatial data).
The goal of his visit was to exchange experience and ideas on data management techniques specifically for geospatial data. Apart from presenting various use cases where geospatial tools have helped scientists to get useful insights from scientific data, Prof. Koubarakis shared with our group future research problems and challenges related to this research area. From our side, SDA researchers presented their work on managing Big Data (query processing, analytics, benchmarking, etc.), as well as realated tools, like SANSA – Semantic Analytics Stack and Ontario – Semantic Data Lake.
SDA and MADgIK have already been working together since a few years in the context of the EU H2020 projects Big Data Europe and WDAqua and hope to strengthen this collaboration in new projects and joint research activities. The important outcome of this meeting was the plan to organize a common workshop on managing scientific geospatial data in the near future.