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Accurate anticipation of the maize harvest date is important in the agricultural market, as it ensures the sustainability of food production in response to the increasing global demand for food. This paper proposes a predictive model to determine the optimal harvest time in maize plots using the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and climatological data. These variables were oversampled and used to train various models, including Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM), Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine (XGBoost), CatBoost and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Bayesian optimisation has been used to find the best hyperparameters and Shapley values to identify the variables that exert the most significant influence on the prediction in each model instance. As a result of this approach, a model with an accuracy of 92.1% and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.935 was developed. The variables that determined these results were atmospheric pressure, mean temperature, precipitation, NDVI, and precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain is the third-largest producer of pork meat in the world, and many farms in several regions depend on the evolution of this market. However, the current pricing system is unfair, as some actors have better market information than others. In this context, historical pricing is an easy-to-find and affordable data source that can help all agents to be better informed. However, the time lag in data acquisition can affect their pricing decisions. In this paper, we study the effect that data acquisition delay has on a price prediction system using multiple prediction algorithms. We describe the integration of the best proposal into a decision support system prototype and test it in a real-case scenario. Specifically, we use public data from the most important regional pork meat markets in Spain published by the Ministry of Agriculture with a two-week delay and subscription-based data of the same markets obtained on the same day. The results show that the error difference between the best public and data subscription models is 0.6 Euro cents in favour of the data without delay. The market dimension makes these differences significant in the supply chain, giving pricing agents a better tool to negotiate market prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incunabula are the texts printed mainly during the second half of 15th century that are a key cultural element in a revolutionary period of the history and evolution of the book and the printing. In these books, the identification of their origin largely affects its academic, cultural, patrimonial, and economical value. This paper proposes a process to automate the identification of the origin of a digitised incunable document using the Proctor/Haebler method, a commonly established procedure in the field. This process has been validated with a selected dataset obtained from the incunabula collection at the digital repository of the University of Zaragoza. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mapping (1131-9100) is the property of eGeoMapping S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the current world, it is easy to listen that everybody and everything is connected. Over this connected world, the concept of location-based services has grown in order to provide digital services in everyplace and at every time. Nevertheless, this is not 100% true because the connection is not guaranteed for many people and in many places. These are the Degraded Communications Environments (DCE), environments where the availability of high-speed communications is not guaranteed in at least the 75% of the time. This paper works over the experience of a previous work in developing light protocols that do not need broadband for communication. This work provides an extension of these protocols for the inclusion of mobile devices as elements of the communication process and a set of libraries to allow the development of applications in DCE. The work done has involved the development of two frameworks: an Android framework that makes the incorporation of Android devices easier and a server-based framework that provides the server side for the development of the referred applications. A use case that uses these two frameworks has been developed. Finally, all technology developed is available throw a public Git repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mapping (1131-9100) is the property of eGeoMapping S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Geospatial data catalogs enable users to discover and access geographical information. Prevailing solutions are document oriented and fragment the spatial continuum of the geospatial data into independent and disconnected resources described through metadata. Due to this, the complete answer for a query may be scattered across multiple resources, making its discovery and access more difficult. This paper proposes an improved information retrieval process for geospatial data catalogs that aggregates the search results by identifying the implicit spatial/thematic relations between the metadata records of the resources. These aggregations are constructed in such a way that they match better the user query than each resource individually. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Mapping (1131-9100) is the property of eGeoMapping S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Consistency is an essential aspect of the quality of metadata. Inconsistent metadata records are harmful: given a themed query, the set of retrieved metadata records would contain descriptions of unrelated or irrelevant resources, and may even not contain some resources considered obvious. This is even worse when the description of the location is inconsistent. Inconsistent spatial descriptions may yield invisible or hidden geographical resources that cannot be retrieved by means of spatially themed queries. Therefore, ensuring spatial consistency should be a primary goal when reusing, sharing and developing georeferenced digital collections. We present a methodology able to detect geospatial inconsistencies in metadata collections based on the combination of spatial ranking, reverse geocoding, geographic knowledge organization systems and information-retrieval techniques. This methodology has been applied to a collection of metadata records describing maps and atlases belonging to the Library of Congress. The proposed approach was able to automatically identify inconsistent metadata records (870 out of 10,575) and propose fixes to most of them (91.5%) These results support the ability of the proposed methodology to assess the impact of spatial inconsistency in the retrievability and visibility of metadata records and improve their spatial consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The breakthrough developments in geospatial technologies and the increasing availability of spatial data make geoinformation a business and a decisional element to the management. Hence, it is important to have a management plan to factor in practical and feasible data sources, in building geo applications. The authors of this paper are motivated by the fact that right data sources could outclass in-house resources in various application scenarios. This paper outlines pragmatic cases for the tangible benefits of the existing potential data and expeditious patterns for digital earth. This work also proposes ‘good-enough’ solutions based on the pragmatic cases, available literature, and the 3D city model developed that could be sufficient in contriving the objectives of the common public usage and open business models. To demonstrate this approach, the paper encapsulated the low-cost development of virtual 3D city model using publicly available cadastral data and web services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jurisdictional domains are generally accepted political divisions of the earth surface that cover specific territorial and functional scopes over time. They are frequently used in information retrieval (IR) to classify and locate resources by means of their geographical location. However, the changes they suffer over time reduce their applicability in historical collections. In this context, and with the objective of improving the use of jurisdictional domains, this article proposes an ontology schema that combines in a single model the administrative structure, the spatial components, and the temporal evolution of jurisdictional domains. This ontology schema has been used to create the Spanish jurisdictional model. Additionally, as an example of its applicability in the IR context, the Spanish model has been used as part of a location-based query component for the Spanish Official State Gazette. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search), Google and Yahoo! in searching standardised XML documents that describe, identify and locate geographic web services. Design/methodology/approach – The study performed an automated evaluation of three search engines using their application programming interfaces. The queries asked for XML documents describing geographic web services, and documents containing links to those documents. Relevant XML documents linked from the documents found in the search results were also included in the evaluation. Findings – The study reveals that the discovery of geographic web services in search engines does not require the use of advanced search operators. Data collected suggest that a resource-oriented search should combine simple queries to search engines with the exploration of the pages linked from the search results. Finally the study identifies Yahoo! as the best performer. Originality/value – This is the first study that measures and compares the performance of major search engines in the discovery of geographic web services. Previous studies were focused on demonstrating the technical feasibility of the approach. The paper also reveals that some technical advances in search engines could harm resource-oriented queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]