project in geoinformation in society, ifgi 2018 Linked Data geo-visualization of European waste generation.
This project was developed in M. Sc. Goinformatics program. ”Waste production in the EU states” and is the result of the course Geoinformation in Society. In this course we get to know the connection between Linked Data in the Semantic Web and Linked Open Science. The result is our project, where we show on a leaflet choropleth map of Europe the respective garbage production per head and country.
We humans produce more and more garbage. We do not want to tolerate this development any longer. For this reason, we have taken a closer look at the amount of waste generated and found that the reported waste production is differs greatly between countries and between regions. We asked ourselves whether a visualization that shows people how much waste is produced could initiate a dialog between instances that produce a lot of waste and instances with a better waste balance. For now, we focus on the EU and regional levels.
We live in the age of linked data. This allows us to link data and retrieve it through semantic queries. But more importantly, it allows us to share information in a way that computers can read automatically. That’s why we work with RDF. So every connection in RDF is coherent and traceable and can be retrieved thanks to linked data. But through linked data alone we do not reach our goal of making people more responsible with resources. For this reason, simple but elegant visualization is very important. We want to provide meaningful information only a few clicks away.
For this tool we decided to use a leaflet choropleth map. This representation can be used effectively to report area values on virtually any scale, from global to local. In addition, the data can be viewed on different levels and in different ways. Starting at the lowest zoom level, the EU data is visualized. Zooming in will visualize the regional data. It is also helpful in identifying contexts or informing people about how their area compares to others. This tool should visualize the generated waste per instance on a map. In addition, the user should be able to click on a specific instance and get an additional visualization of the available data in the form of graphs.
Below you can see an example of the triplestore (RDF store). The excerpt shows observation from the year 2004. The NUTS region is Germany. Two values are also transferred. One is per capita waste generation and the other is energy recovery.
euwaste:obs_2004_DE a qb:Observation;
qb:dataSet euwaste:dataset;
euwaste:refArea nuts:DE;
euwaste:refPeriod "2004"^^xsd:gYear;
euwaste:attrWastePerCapita "4412"^^xsd:decimal;
euwaste:attrEnergyRecovery "138"^^xsd:decimal.
The code excerpt was taken from the file euwaste.turtle. The file is stored in the folder rdf_data.