A Linked Open Data Approach for Visualizing Flood Information

A Case Study of the Rio Doce Basin in Brazil

Patricia Carolina Neves Azevedo

1,2

, Guilherme Sousa Bastos

and Fernando Silva Parreiras

CPRM – Companhia de Pesquisa de Recursos Minerais, Av. Brasil 1731, 30140-002, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

LAIS – Laboratory of Advanced Information Systems, FUMEC University,

Av. Afonso Pena 3880, 30130-009, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

Institute of System Engineering and Information Technology – IESTI, Federal University of Itajub

Av. BPS 1303, 37500-903, Itajub

a, MG, Brazil

patricia.neves@cprm.gov.br, sousa@unifei.br, fernando.parreiras@fumec.br

Keywords:

Linked Open Data, Geographical Information System, Flood, Semantic Web.

Abstract:

The availability of open government data offers an easy way to mix and match these data to create new knowl-

edge. Geographic Information Systems powered by Semantic Web technologies and linked data result in an

integration of data from multiple sources, facilitating its use and enhancing the discovery and dissemination of

new knowledge. In this work, we present a prototype application that integrates heterogeneous data located in

various public organizations, related to ﬂooding in Rio Doce Basin – Brazil. For this purpose, data were con-

verted to RDF format, linked and displayed on a Geographic Information System, through SPARQL queries.

We validate our approach using a proof of concept. The results show that our proposal of liking open data

about ﬂood information is able to answer the identiﬁed competency questions.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Brazilian federal government, through responsi-

ble agencies, adopts actions to minimize the damage

caused by ﬂoods in river basins, such as collecting

and analyzing data. However, despite the amount of

information available, these are spread out over sev-

eral data sources in multiple institutions (eg, govern-

ment agencies, private companies and academic insti-

tutions), databases, schemas and heterogeneous for-

mats. Some data are available only in PDF or scanned

image ﬁles in non-compliance to the Brazilian Infor-

mation Access Law (Law No. 12,527) and are caus-

ing rework in agencies and entities that use these ﬁles.

The diversity of formats and data models hampers the

interpretation, integration and reuse. Moreover, there

is not possible to display them for a interested user in

following up the history of water levels in the rivers

of the Rio Doce basin.

In this context, the following question unfolds:

What are the concepts and technologies that allow

the integration and make available the data related to

ﬂoods in the Rio Doce Basin?

When dealing with ﬂoods, one realizes that vi-

sualization, interaction and dissemination of these

data can assist in disaster management. In this con-

text, the principles of linked data (Bizer et al., 2009)

are a means to make the information shared on the

web available in an standardized way, publishing and

linked datasets.

This paper presents a framework able to (1) re-

ceive, from different sources, data about ﬂoods in

Rio Doce Basin, (2) integrate them using semantic

web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) technologies and stan-

dards and (3) make them available visually to inter-

ested users.

Thus, by viewing the integrated data from the Rio

Doce basin, it will be possible to identify vulnerable

communities and develop emergency and preventive

actions, contributing to disaster management on the

basin of the Rio Doce.

The Brazilian government encourages the publica-

tion of data to the public through the Internet, aiming

to inform the population and support the transparency

of government data. However, the publication of un-

structured data is insufﬁcient to achieve the goals of

efﬁciency, transparency and accountability. Seman-

tic Web technology can contribute to achieving these

goals by providing data integration of heterogeneous

sources.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 con-

textualizes the research problem. Section 3 describes

227

Carolina Neves Azevedo P., Sousa Bastos G. and Silva Parreiras F..

A Linked Open Data Approach for Visualizing Flood Information - A Case Study of the Rio Doce Basin in Brazil.

DOI: 10.5220/0005465502270232

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM-2015), pages

227-232

ISBN: 978-989-758-099-4

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

the background. Section 4 details the proposed solu-

tion for visualizing linked data about ﬂoods in the Rio

Doce basin, presenting the conceptual framework.

Section 5 describes the implementation. Section 6

discusses the related work and Section 7 concludes

the paper by highlighting its contribution and future

lines of action.

2 SCENARIO

When analyzing the current situation of data from the

Rio Doce basin, we observed that they are not in a

format available for reuse. Nowadays, only reports

with measurement data from sensors installed along

the Rio Doce basin are available on the Internet, us-

ing technical language, not appropriate for lay users.

In this scenario, in which citizens do not have access

to information about the historical and monitoring of

water levels from the Rio Doce basin, answering the

following questions can expand the vision of man-

agers and interested citizens:

Q1: What was the level of the river the monitoring

points which recorded ﬂood in the day X?

Q2: What is the region with the largest population

affected by ﬂoods in the day X?

Q3: What are the municipalities most affected by

rain with HDI below of X?

Q4: The works against ﬂoods from Brazilian Accel-

eration Plan (PAC) are developed in the most af-

fected areas?

Q5: On which areas occurs more ﬂoods and diseases

related to ﬂoods?

Q6: In which areas the occurrence of ﬂooding hap-

pened in areas of low altitude?

3 BACKGROUND AND

OBJECTIVES

When analyzing data about natural disasters in Brazil

during the period 1980-2010, provided by the main

database used by the UN, the International Disaster

Database (EM-DAT), one might notice that the main

recurring natural hazards are ﬂoods. Brazil is the sev-

enth country in the global ranking on the number of

ﬂood victims. The study obtained data from 97 coun-

tries between 1980 and 2000, and reported that more

than 29 million Brazilians live at risk of being affected

by ﬂooding (Collins, 2004).

Figure 1: Overview of the proposed architecture, based

on (Herman, 2012).

This work is supported by the Brazilian govern-

ment initiative as regards about opening and dissemi-

nation of public data, according to the Brazilian Infor-

mation Access Law (Brasil, 2011). Considering the

interest by the government and the demand for solu-

tions in the Rio Doce Basin, often afﬂicted by ﬂoods

that causes economic, human and material losses, the

focus will be the use of Geographical Information

Systems (GIS) (Burrough et al., 1998) and seman-

tic web tools as framework to generate information

about the dynamics of the phenomenon in the Rio

Doce Basin.

Government data published on the Web, by it-

self, already has great value for the population, as

they contribute to increased transparency. But mak-

ing such information available in open and accessible

formats allows them to be machine-readable, facili-

tating the discovery, consumption and adding value,

allowing linkage of data to other datasets.

In the scope of this work, we developed a pro-

totype application which receives, from different

sources, data about ﬂoods in the Rio Doce basin, in-

tegrates it and makes it available to interested users.

4 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The Figure 1 depicts the decomposition of compo-

nents that are part of the proposed solution, and the

relations between them. With this architecture, it is

possible, through linked data technologies and princi-

ples (Bizer et al., 2009), to receive data from differ-

ent organizations, to integrate them and to make them

available visually.

The Figure 1 is divided according to the following

layers:

(a) Data. The data were obtained from various pub-

lic agencies in different formats (txt, dat, csv, xml,

GISTAM2015-1stInternationalConferenceonGeographicalInformationSystemsTheory,ApplicationsandManagement

228

rdf), and open data from the Linked Data Com-

munity available on the Internet. These data were

stored in a database and converted to standard

RDF (Manola and Miller, 2004).

(b) Dataset. The dataset generated from the conver-

sion is already one of the results of this research.

It concerns any information of the levels of the

rivers that comprise the Rio Doce Basin, as well as

levels of attention and alert and information from

municipalities connected. To answer the research

questions, the SPARQL queries (PrudHommeaux

et al., 2008) were engineered and the result for-

warded to GIS.

on top of the architecture, where the information

is displayed through the GIS, in a friendly inter-

face and able to answer the questions suggested

initially.

The Figure 1 shows three layers of the proposed

solution architecture, where the ﬁrst layer are the

datasets. These data, relating to ﬂoods in the Rio

Doce basin, are in different formats and will be con-

verted to standard RDF with the aim of being in-

terconnected and thereby generate the RDF graph,

which is illustrated in the second layer of the architec-

ture. In the last layer, we will use SPARQL

to query

on this data. The result is the combination of all data,

and a geographic visualization in a GIS. Geographic

information is distinguished from other information

by referring to objects or phenomena in a speciﬁc lo-

cation in space and, therefore, has an spatial address

(Kraak and Ormeling, 2003).

As one of our goals is to create a new dataset

with data from ﬂooding from the Rio Doce basin,

it has become necessary to collect data from differ-

ent sources, including government databases. In this

case, there were collected data from ANA (National

Water Agency), ANEEL (National Energy Agency),

Cemig (Energy Company), IGAM (State Institute for

Water Management) and CPRM (Mineral Resource

Research Company) through FTP sites or directly

through the organization’s Web site.

After structuring the data, RDF is used

to rep-

resent the information, as proposed by the W3C to

publish linked data on the web.

As systems databases make use of SQL to query

records in databases, SPARQL is a query language for re-

trieving information in RDF graphs (PrudHommeaux et al.,

2008).

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language

for representing information on the Web and designed

for situations where information needs to be processed

by applications, rather than simply being shown to peo-

ple (Manola and Miller, 2004).

5 IMPLEMENTATION

5.1 Data

Data used in this study came from many sources,

including governmental agencies. These data were

in unstructured formats and have undergone harmo-

nizing, rescaling, and cleaning before its use in the

prototype. Given the effort to promote the seman-

tic web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we tried to follow

open standards as recommended by W3C, represent-

ing datasets as linked data (Bizer et al., 2009).

The dataset creation involved two lines of action:

the extraction of collected data through FTP sites or

HTML pages of organizations and data conversion

from relational databases to RDF model.

Several measurement stations operate in different

parts of the rivers and municipalities. Data extracted

from these were in TXT format and were converted

to CSV using MS Excel software. Other data also

related to river levels were collected directly from a

CPRM’s server, with an employee help. These were

in DAT format and were also converted into CSV

using the same software. Data were collected from

the government website in XML format

, regard-

ing the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) in Mi-

nas Gerais. Data about HDI of the municipalities was

obtained through the PNUD website

, and were in

CSV format. In Brazilian Health Portal website, we

collected data about the occurrence of the following

diseases related to ﬂoods: tetanus, dengue, leptospiro-

sis, malaria, hepatitis A and C, typhoid and cholera.

These data were also found in CSV format. Popula-

tion and altitude data of each municipality was col-

lected directly from the Brazilian Statistics Bureau

(IBGE)

website in CSV format.

Other sources of data were used aiming to aggre-

gate information, as shown in Table 1.

5.2 Dataset

To convert spreadsheet, CSV ﬁles, XML ﬁles, rela-

tional databases and other documents to RDF format

we used D2RQ platform (Bizer and Seaborne, 2004).

The D2RQ was chosen for use in this study be-

cause of some factors, among which stands out the

ﬂexibility of mapping language, the simplicity of the

commands and the generation of RDF dumps, making

possible the reuse of the dataset created.

The next step was to generate RDF dump ﬁle

from the mapping ﬁle and through the dump-rdf

http://dados.gov.br/

http://www.pnud.org.br/

http://cidades.ibge.gov.br/

ALinkedOpenDataApproachforVisualizingFloodInformation-ACaseStudyoftheRioDoceBasininBrazil

229

Table 1: Source, description and format of data used in the

study.

Source Description Format

ANA Precipitation and Rivers

Levels

DAT

ANEEL Precipitation and Rivers

Levels

CSV

CEMIG Precipitation CSV

IGAM Precipitation TXT

CPRM Rivers Levels Database

Transparency

Portal of MG

Onlending of Invest-

ments

CSV

IBGE Population and Altitude CSV

Health Portal Diseases CSV

PNUD HDI CSV

Open Data Portal PAC Works XML

Geonames Geographic Names, lat-

itude and longitude

RDF

DBPEDIA General data of the

cities

RDF

D2RQ platform tool. The command provides the fol-

lowing types of output format: Turtle, RDF/XML,

RDF/XML-Abbrev, N3 or N-Triple. In this work, the

RDF/XML has been used.

5.3 Visualization in a GIS

The result of SPARQL queries was displayed into the

GIS, a web application implemented using JavaScript

language, where the user selects data about the Rio

Doce basin, to be viewed on the map. Different com-

binations can be made with the objective of linking

data from multiple sources simultaneously, for exam-

ple, you can see if the places with high occurrence

of ﬂoods are the same with occurrences of diseases

related to ﬂoods or low HDI.

6 VALIDATION

In order to validate the proposed approach, a proof

of concept through competency questions was con-

ducted, as presented in Section 2. Following, the

demonstration of queries use in the application and

its results.

6.1 Data

With the RDF dataset created about the ﬂoods in the

Rio Doce Basin and aggregate data, such information

becomes part of the Web of Data, where machines and

humans can search and use this data set as one of its

data sources.

Is believed that the availability of open and stan-

dardized data enables discovery of new knowledge

through reuse of this data in new applications. Pub-

lishing data about ﬂoods in Rio Doce Basin follows

the principles of linked data and enables discovery,

integration and searches for other sources of data.

The ﬁgure 2 shows the RDF graph, generated

from the RDF ﬁle, where the classes Town and River

inherit from the upper class Thing.

Figure 2: RDF graph representing the dataset created.

After generating data in RDF model, the ﬁle is val-

idated according to Linked Data principles. This ver-

iﬁcation was taken through the online validation tool

W3C RDF Validation Service which was executed

successfully. RDF ﬁles are available in RDF/XML

and N/Triple formats at the following links:

RDF/XML: https://db.tt/pJ0r78qw - N/Triple:

https://db.tt/DKx7dkK4. Thus, data are ready to be

consumed as linked data through browsers, search en-

gines or applications for speciﬁc domains.

6.2 Dataset

The table 2 shows queries and results, limited to 10

lines and no sorting, of the competency questions Q1

and Q2 respectively, as a form of validation of the

concepts mentioned before.

6.3 Visualization in a GIS

Visualization and interaction of linked data is a ques-

tion that has been recognized since the beginning of

the Semantic Web (Geroimenko and Chen, 2003).

When applying techniques of information visualiza-

tion, semantic beb assists users in exploration and in-

teraction data. The processing and visual presentation

of these data are the main goals of information visual-

ization, so that users can get a better understanding of

GISTAM2015-1stInternationalConferenceonGeographicalInformationSystemsTheory,ApplicationsandManagement

230

Figure 3: Visualization of query Q1.

Table 2: Query Q1.

Which stations recorded ﬂood on 01/09/2012?

SELECT ?resource ?cod station ?station ?mea-

sure ?alert level ?date

WHERE { ?resource geonames:featureCode

?cod station .

?resource paoli:Open stream water level recorders

?station .

?resource dbpprop:date ?date .

?resource loa:WATER LEVEL 2 ?measure .

?resource ontosem:ﬂood ?alert level .

FILTER (?date = ”2012-09-01”ˆˆxsd:date)}

the data (Card et al., 1999). Visualizations are useful

for obtaining an overview of the datasets, their main

types and the relationships between them.

This application of data visualization provides two

main contributions: the visualization of information

into a map and the proof that it is possible to make

consistents applications from the dataset created in

this research. The ﬁgure 3 illustrates the resulting pro-

totype, which presents the return of SPARQL queries

on a map.

In accordance with the Figure 3, the most popu-

lous municipalities which have suffered from ﬂooding

on 20/01/12 were Governador Valadares, Caratinga,

Timteo and Coronel Fabriciano.

7 RELATED WORK

An early example of using geographic information

system was performed by John Snow showing re-

lation between water supply and cholera outbreaks

in London in 1854, achieved by linking public

data about contaminated water and disease (Johnson,

2006).

In the research of Nurefs¸an Gr, Laura Diaz e

Tomi Kauppinen, was used linked open data to pub-

lish health-related data, such as diseases, disorders,

genes, and drugs into a technology of visualization

referred to geo web. For this, the use case studied was

RCPH - Research Center of Public Health, based on

three conceptual domains: health, spatial and statisti-

cal and following the linked data principles. Finally

was used an infrastructure integrating geospatial and

semantic web technologies to show mortality rates for

speciﬁc diseases in a spatio-temporal format. (G

et al., 2012).

Finally, (Vilches-Bl

azquez et al., 2010) presented

ALinkedOpenDataApproachforVisualizingFloodInformation-ACaseStudyoftheRioDoceBasininBrazil

231

a sequence of procedures used to develop an applica-

tion that used multiple heterogeneous public datasets,

about Spain, which are speciﬁcally related to admin-

istrative units, hydrography and statistical units. The

application aims to analyze existing relations between

the Spanish coastal area and different statistical vari-

ables such as population, unemployment, housing,

industry, commerce and construction. Besides pro-

viding methodological guidelines for the generation,

publishing and exploitation of Linked Data from these

datasets, it was used resources to handle the geomet-

ric information of data.

Can be observed that all related work generate an

RDF ﬁle and visualization in a GIS, however none

combined data from a speciﬁc topic with statistical

data from the location involved, as seen in this study.

It is important to note the use of government data in

all related work.

8 CONCLUSION

With the RDF dataset created about ﬂoods in Rio

Doce Basin and aggregate data, such information be-

comes part of the Web of Data, where machines and

humans can search and use this data set as one of its

data sources.

Thereby, the contribution of this experiment en-

compasses the use of methods and tools for publish-

ing data as the principles and standards linked data.

It is believed that the availability of open and stan-

dardized data enables discovery of new knowledge,

of this data through reuse in new applications. For

the citizen, the developed application allows a user-

friendly visualization of data involved in the research

and knowledge discovery from them.

In future, it is suggested adding data from year

2013 to compare to 2012 data, identify advances in

government measures against ﬂoods, disease control

and river levels in the same seasons. In addition, other

lines of future action are highlighted: a) Expansion

of the Dataset: The inclusion of pertinent data im-

proves the relevance, especially when link with exist-

ing data; b) Improvements in data visualization ap-

plication: Extending the dataset enables new ways of

representing data more user friendly way. Therefore,

the visualization of information can be enhanced with

a larger amount of data, making it more dynamic and

interactive for the end user application.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is partially supported by the Brazilian

Funding Agencies FAPEMIG, CNPq and CAPES.

REFERENCES

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O., et al. (2001). The

semantic web. Scientiﬁc american, 284(5):28–37.

Bizer, C., Heath, T., and Berners-Lee, T. (2009). Linked

data-the story so far. International journal on seman-

tic web and information systems, 5(3):1–22.

Bizer, C. and Seaborne, A. (2004). D2rq-treating non-rdf

databases as virtual rdf graphs. In Proceedings of

ISWC2004, volume 2004.

Brasil (2011). Law on Access to Public Information. Law

Number 12.527/2011.

Burrough, P. A., McDonnell, R., Burrough, P. A., and Mc-

Donnell, R. (1998). Principles of geographical infor-

mation systems, volume 333. Oxford university press.

Card, S. K., MacKinlay, J. D., and Schneiderman, B.

(1999). Readings in information visualization: using

vision to think. Interactive Technologies Series. Mor-

gan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA,

USA.

Collins, T. (2004). Disaster risk for ﬂoods.

Geroimenko, V. and Chen, C. (2003). Visualizing the Se-

mantic Web: Xml-Based Internet and Information Vi-

sualization. Springer-Verlag GmbH.

ur, N., D

ıaz, L., and Kauppinen, T. (2012). Gi systems

for public health with an ontology based approach. In

AGILE2012, Avignon, France.

Herman, I. (2012). Tutorial on semantic web technolo-

gies. Presentation. Available on http://www.w3.org/

People/Ivan/CorePresentations/SWTutorial/.

Johnson, S. (2006). The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s

Most Terrifying Epidemic–and how it Changed Sci-

ence, Cities, and the Modern World. Riverhead Books.

Kraak, J. and Ormeling, F. J. (2003). Cartography: visual-

ization of geospatial data. Prentice Hall.

Manola, F. and Miller, E., editors (2004). RDF Primer.

W3C Recommendation. W3C.

PrudHommeaux, E., Seaborne, A., et al. Sparql query lan-

guage for rdf. W3c recommendation, W3C.

Vilches-Bl

azquez, L. M., Villaz

on-Terrazas, B., Saquicela,

V., de Le

on, A., Corcho, O., and G

omez-P

erez, A.

(2010). Geolinked data and inspire through an ap-

plication case. In SIGSPATIAL 2010, GIS ’10, pages

446–449, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

GISTAM2015-1stInternationalConferenceonGeographicalInformationSystemsTheory,ApplicationsandManagement

232