Post-doctoral position
Semantic Techniques for
the management of Earth Observation Data
Key words: geographic
data, image metadata, ontologies, semantic indexing, semantic
search
Context:
H2020 CANDELA project (2018-2020)
http://www.candela-h2020.eu/
With the advent of the Copernicus program, a wealth of Earth
Observation (EO) data will be made available. The applications and
services developed on this data are increasingly adopting big data
technologies for an efficient data storage and processing, and to
support data analytics and application development. The main
objective of the CANDELA project is to allow the creation of value
from Copernicus data through the provisioning of modelling and
analytics tools (data collection, processing, storage and access
will be provided by the Copernicus Data and Information Access
Service (DIAS). The implementation starts by putting in place a
set of powerful tools that drastically lowers the cost of getting
familiar with the data and creating new services. These modules
will provide machine learning, data mining, data fusion and web
semantics solutions, combining the Copernicus data and information
with other non-EO data sources to derive novel applications and
services. CANDELA will demonstrate the breadth of project
capabilities by means of two reference scenario, a first one in
macro-economics and agriculture; and a second one for forest
health monitoring (FHM).
Position
Description
Within task 2.2 of CANDELA,
the postdoctoral work aims at designing and implementing semantic
search capabilities over the Earth observation image collections
and their descriptive semantic data. The descriptive semantic data
will include a semantic representation of various types of data:
(i) the image metadata (type of sensor, distance from the ground,
image quality, geolocalization …), (ii) data extracted from images
or image series and (iii) open data that provide additional
information of interest. They will make it easier to search for
relevant images in these collections. To this end, we will use
ontologies and external resources like LOD (Linked Open Data).
This work will be jointly carried out with data producers and
partners involved in use-case definitions for one target
application field, agriculture. Main tasks and expected output:
to set
up an annotation model and process to populate relevant domain
ontologies that will model metadata and geographic data in the
selected application domain (possibly agriculture);
to
build one or several open ontologies for at least one case
study;
to
produce and publish semantic metadata of the Earth observation
image collections, based on the standard metadata and the
ontologies;
to
design a search tool to identify images combining spatial,
temporal and other kinds of dimensions.
Research issues to be
investigated in this project include ontology engineering,
semantic data for image annotation and search, web as a source
of formal vocabularies reusable to annotate images, and semantic
data alignment. The candidate will define a vocabulary for the
integration of geolocalized data, an annotation model as well as
methods and support tools for populating geolocalized ontologies
for image indexing, and then a semantic search tool to query
these annotated images. Methods and tools will be adapted to at
least one of the application fields (agriculture or forestry).
Requirements
for this position
Applicants are required to
have a PhD in Computer Science, a strong background in semantic
web technologies, ontology engineering, linked data management
and query. Fluency in written / spoken English is required too.
Experience on geographical data, a good publication record and
strong programing skills, as well as fluency in French language
will be a plus.
Work environment
Host lab: Institut de Recherche
en informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) – UPS, 118 Route de Narbonne
F-31062 Toulouse Cedex – France
Duration: 12 months – starting on Sept 2018, 1st
Host
group: MELODI http://www.irit.fr/ -Equipe-MELODI-
The candidate will work with three permanent academic
researchers, and a PhD student, and will collaborate with the
partner companies in the project, mainly Thalès Aliena Space,
Terranis and ATOS.
Income: between 1800 and 2700 euros free of taxes (“net”)
monthly according to past experience
How to apply?
Applications will be accepted until the position is
closed. Applicants should send a full Curriculum including a
complete list of publications, a cover letter indicating their
research interests, achievements to date and vision for the
future, as well as either support letters or the name of 2 persons
that have worked with them. Contact: N. Aussenac-Gilles <aussenac@irit.fr> +33 5 61 55 82 93 or C. Trojahn <Cassia.Trojahn@irit.fr>
—
Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles
IRIT – Equipe MELODI
Universite Paul Sabatier
118, route de Narbonne
31062 TOULOUSE Cedex 9
http://www.irit.fr/~Nathalie.Aussenac-Gilles aussenac@irit.fr
Tel : +33 5 61 55 82 93 Fax : +33 5 61 55 62 58
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