Provisional Programme: Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure
26th and 27th of November
Monday the 26th November:
Talk Time
Talk Theme
09:00 – 09:10
Welcome
Chair: Werner Kuhn
Novel methods for sharing and
0:9:10 – 10:05
integrating Web-based data
10:05 – 11:00
11:00 – 11:15
11:15 – 12:00
Managing Geospatial Knowledge in
Contextualized Information Spaces
coffee
Linking data on the Semantic Web?
12:00 – 13:15
lunch
Chair: Femke Reitsma
13:15 – 14:00
Geo- standards and semantics: bridging
the gap
14:00 – 14:45
Semantic Trust in Scientific Data
Sharing
14:45 – 15:15
Coffee
Chair: Alia Abdelmoty
15:15 – 16:15
Spatiotemporal Ontologies for
Geospatial Resource Discovery
16:15 – 17:30
Talk
abstract
Speaker
Alia/Werner/Femke
Jonathan Rees,
Science Commons
Arno Scharl: MODUL
University Vienna
Giovanni Tummarello:
DERI Galway
Andrew Woolf:
CCLRC e-Science
Centre
Joshua Lieberman,
Traverse Technologies
Inc.
Thomas Bittner,
NCGIA, University of
Buffalo
Demos and
presentations Mohamed
(Munster), Yang
(Edinburgh), Philip
(Cardiff)
Tuesday the 27th November:
Talk Time
Talk Theme
09:10 – 09:15
Welcome
Chair: Werner Kuhn?
Towards a geosemantic infrastructure:
09:15 – 10:00
the need for end-user tools
10:00 – 10:45
Ontology based discovery and
annotation of resources in geospatial
applications
Coffee
10:45 – 11:15
Chair: Chris Jones
11:15 – 12:00
Geospatial Semantics Research at
Ordnance Survey
12:00-12:15
An Ontology-Based Approach to
Assigning Sensors to Tasks
12:45 – 13:00
13:00 – 14:00
Lunch
Chair: Alia Abdelmoty
14:00 – 14:45
Geo-annotations in Semantic Digital
Libraries
14:45 – 15:30
15:30 – 17:00
Authoring an ontology of place
semantics using volunteered
geographic information
coffee and discussion
Talk Title Talker
Alia/Werner/Femke
Rob Lemmens, ITC, The
Netherlands
Ulrich Bügel Fraunhofer
IITB
Ian Holt, Ordnance
Survey, UK
Alun Preece, Cardiff
University
Demo by Geeth
Maciej Dabrowski:
Semantic Infrastructure
Lab, DERI, Galway
Alistair Edwardes:
University of Zurich:
Abstracts
Jonathan Rees
Novel methods for sharing and integrating Web-based data
Despite a bloom of Web infrastructure for linking, sharing, and collaboration, the
practice of science suffers from avoidable inefficiencies around information access.
Sharing and integrating data sets and other information ("knowledge") is harder than
it should be, with most useful information locked up inside articles, data files in a
wide variety of formats, and databases with complex, idiosyncratic schemas. I will
discuss the approach that Science Commons is taking to promote distributed open
knowledge management and low-overhead data recombination, and report on our
experiences in aggregating data sources in the field of neuroscience.
Biosketch:
Jonathan Rees is Principal Scientist at Science Commons, a public interest nonprofit
dedicated to eliminating legal and technical friction points in the scientific research
cycle. Jonathan is a computer scientist with interests in biological knowledge
representation, the Semantic Web, open access publishing, and software technology.
Prior to joining Science Commons he worked in the Computational Biology group at
Millennium Pharmaceuticals on large-scale curated protein interaction networks and
their use in the analysis of high-throughput experimental data. He earned his PhD at
MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Arno Scharl
Managing Geospatial Knowledge in Contextualized Information Spaces
Recent advances in collaborative Web technology are governed by strong network
effects and the harnessing of collective intelligence. As a result, information spreads
rapidly across Web sites, blogs and Wiki applications. IDIOM (Information Diffusion
across Interactive Online Media) investigates this process through a portfolio of
semantic services. Linguists define "Idiom" as an expression whose meaning is
different from the literal meanings of its component words. Similarly, the study of
information diffusion promises insights that cannot be inferred from individual
network elements. The IDIOM framework includes ontology-based tools to build and
maintain contextualized information spaces, analytical components to reveal content
diffusion and interaction patterns within these spaces, and visual interfaces for
presenting geospatial and semantic information. The ’Media Watch on Climate
Change’, one of IDIOM's use cases, provides a repository of environmental
knowledge built by crawling about 300,000 news media articles in weekly intervals.
Tagging services annotate each article to create a contextualized information space. A
system component for automatically extending ontologies helps structure the
knowledge repository, and feeds an ontology-based visualization module.
Further Information
* http://www.idiom.at
IDIOM Semantic Systems Project
* http://www.ecoresearch.net/climate
Media Watch on Climate Change
* http://www.geospatialweb.com
The Geospatial Web - How Geobrowsers, Social Software
and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society
Prof Arno Scharl is the Vice President of MODUL University Vienna, where he also
heads the Department of New Media Technology. Prior to his current appointment, he
held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University of
Technology, was a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for
Knowledge Management, and a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology
and the University of California at Berkeley. Arno Scharl completed his doctoral
research, and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business
Administration. Additionally, he holds a PhD and MSc from the University of
Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. He has edited a recent book on "The
Geospatial Web" (www.geospatialweb.com), founded the ECOresearch Network
(www.ecoresearch.net) and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on
Informatics for Environmental Protection (www.enviroinfo.net). His current research
interests focus on the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology, Web
mining and media monitoring, virtual communities and environmental online
communication.
CV & List of Publications
http://www.ecoresearch.net/scharl
Maciej Dabrowski
Geo-annotations in Semantic Digital Libraries
The amount of unstructured, geo-referenced information available on the Web
constantly grows.
Popular Web 2.0 services, such as Flickr, encourage users to contribute geo-tagged
resources.
This information is valuable for browsing and filtering purposes.
Systems aware of geo-annotated information can provide new ways of exploring the
real world through digital information space.
Geo-annotated resources provide many interesting opportunities also for digital
libraries. Processing information that is both unstructured and contributed by the
community of users poses new challenges for digital libraries.
We will present how semantic digital libraries, such as JeromeDL, can be used to
support, and further exploit, geo-tagged information.
Bio:
I am a PhD student (Semantic Infrastructure Lab at eLITE) and project manager
(MarcOnt Initiative) affiliated with DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway.
Currently my research work is related to Semantic Web technologies. My main area
of interest covers ontology development and digital libraries as well as HumanComputer Interaction.
Rob Lemmens
Towards a geosemantic infrastructure: the need for end-user tools
Meaningful information sharing involves agreements between people on how they
model their knowledge. For the materialisation of these agreements some form of a
basis is needed. For this we distinguish here between a framework and an
infrastructure.
A semantic interoperability framework can be defined as the combination of
ontologies, their relationships, and methods for ontology-based description of
information sources (services, data sets, etc.). A semantic interoperability
infrastructure comprises a semantic interoperability framework and the tools to
maintain and use the framework as well as the (meta-)information sources that are
produced with these tools.
The current widespread development of Web 2.0 applications is resulting in –merely
informal- ontologies that are distributed, dynamic and maintained within different
information communities. To combine information within and across those
communities, a number of needs arise:
•
A set of mappings between the ontologies that make them consistent as a set.
The ontologies should allow for ontology extensions by means of new
mappings between new and existing concepts.
•
A set of guidelines on how to derive descriptions for the data sets and services,
based on the ontologies, and how to use them for matchmaking.
•
The following steps are needed in building a geosemantic interoperability
infrastructure:
(a) Semantic framework building, comprising of ontology building and
prescription of
description creation.
(b) Documentation and on-line presentation of the ontologies.
(c) Tool building (preferably by using and/or adapting existing tools):
i. Creation of dedicated client interface for information providers for
the creation of data set/service descriptions, based on ontology
concepts.
ii. Creation of dedicated client interface with examples of queries /
reasoning requests for the information consumer.
The presentation discusses the feasibility of the geosemantic infrastructure by
providing some examples of currently available solutions for the above needs.
Biosketch
Rob Lemmens is an assistant professor at the International Institute for GeoInformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC). His research activities focus on
interoperability and geosemantic issues in spatial data infrastructures and client/server
application development, based on ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium
specifications. Lemmens has a PhD in geoinformatics from Delft University of
Technology. Contact him at lemmens@itc.nl.
Ulrich Bügel
Ontology Based Discovery and Annotation of Resources in Geospatial
Applications
The overall goal of ORCHESTRA [1] is to design and implement a service oriented
architecture (SOA) that will improve the interoperability among actors involved in
multi-risk management. The ORCHESTRA architecture is open and based on
standards. Some of the results are being used as input to the European INSPIRE and
GMES initiatives.
By adapting the ISO Reference Model for “Open Distributed Processing” (RM-ODP)
to the requirements of a SOA, a reference model for the ORCHESTRA (RM-OA)
architecture has been specified and published, which reached Best Practice status at
OGC (“Open Geospatial Consortium”) [2].
To date most standardisation work in the area of distributed processing has focused on
the interaction syntax (e.g. signature of interfaces) and on the structure of the
transferred data. These two aspects provide for physical connectivity and exchange of
data, and they allow a distributed architecture to be realized. However, similar
information content in different nodes may refer to substantially different things and
the systems consequently do not interoperate at the level of semantics.
In ORCHESTRA, ontologies provide background knowledge which can be used to
explicate the meaning of content. Ontology-based semantic meta-information is
attached to information items and services such that these can be related to each other
on a semantic level. Thus, in ORCHESTRA work on semantic interoperability
promoted by various standard organisations - e.g. the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) - is of prime importance.
The generic part of the ORCHESTRA architecture comprises a number of semantic
services and interfaces:
- The Annotation Service automatically generates meta-information from structured
and unstructured sources and relates them to elements of an ontology specified in
an ontology language such as OWL or RDF-Schema.
- The Ontology Access Service provides for high-level access to the content of an
ontology.
- The Knowledge Base Interface conveys query requests to models stored in a
knowledge base’s local processing engine.
- The Semantic Catalogue Service expands queries to ORCHESTRA catalogues by
means of ontologies and creates reports containing references to meta-information
gathered from several conventional catalogues.
The presentation focuses on the Semantic Catalogue and Annotation Service and how
the are validated in the ORCHESTRA pilots. The inclusion of semantic services in
various scenarios leads to significant functional enhancements and is the foundation
for semantic interoperability.
[1] Integrated Project ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data
Infrastructure for Risk Management), IST FP6-511679, 9/2004-2/2008,
http://www.eu-orchestra.org
[2] Usländer, Thomas (Ed.) 2007: RM-OA - Reference Model for the ORCHESTRA
Architecture. ORCHESTRA Deliverable D3.2.2, Version 2.1. OGC Best Practice
Paper 07-97, August 2007, http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/bp
Biosketch:
Ulrich Bügel studied informatics at the University of Karlsruhe.
Since 1983 he is employed as scientist at the Fraunhofer Institut IITB in Karlsruhe.
His main working area is the design and development of web-based information
systems, with the environmental sector as one important application area. His current
research topics are innovative Content Management Systems, Semantic Web
Technologies and Knowledge Management. In the integrated EU project
ORCHESTRA, he works on integration of Semantic Technologies into an open, OGC
compatible Service Oriented Architecture improving interoperability.
Alun Preece
An Ontology-Based Approach to Assigning Sensors to Tasks
Knowledge has been defined as "actionable information": information on which you
can make decisions and perform actions. Some of the hardest decisions have to be
taken in emergency situations, where people must make the best decisions with the
best information available at the time.
In this talk I'll review some recent work which tries to bridge the gap that currently
exists between, on one hand, people trying to do difficult tasks in challenging
environments (such as emergency response, humanitarian relief, and military and
policing operations) and, on the other hand, the rich information-providing
capabilities of networks of sensors and other information sources. I will cover work in
defining ontologies for tasks and missions, and various attempts to define ontologies
for sensors and sources. I will highlight the need for a framework that links these
ontologies together, and discuss a prototype tool that uses automated reasoning to
solve the sensor assignment problem using a composed set of ontologies.
Ian Holt
Geospatial Semantics Research at Ordnance Survey
This talk will cover the various aspects of semantics research at Ordnance Survey, the
national mapping agency of Britain. Motivated by the need to make our data more
understandable and more easily used by our customers, our aim is to develop an
ontology that represents our organisation's knowledge of topography and the data in
our spatial database, along with the tools and techniques to merge ontologies and
query data through them. This will then allow the integration of our data with our
customers' at a semantic rather than syntactic level, as well as enable us to procude
customised data products using customers' specialised terminology. Along with
ontology authoring and merging, this talk will present our two approaches to linking
ontologies to our database - through direct use of RDF data, and the creation of virtual
RDF graphs from relational databases. In particular, this talk will discuss our
experiments on bridging the semantic gap from relational database to domain
ontology by encoding the mapping in a "data ontology". This imports a spatial
relations ontology, with can then be mapped on to Oracle SQL spatial operators, as a
first approach to the problem of how to combine spatial and semantic querying.
Alistair Edwardes
Authoring an ontology of place semantics using volunteered geographic
information
The talk will examine how the notion of place, as enunciated in theoretical geography,
can provide a means to enhance metadata associated with digital photographs. It will
illustrate these ideas by describing the development of a controlled vocabulary of
terms used in describing place by contributors to the website of geograph
(www.geograph.org.uk). This is a volunteered source collecting "geographically
representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and
the Republic of Ireland." A set of statistical (for example term co-occurrence) and
data mining (for example multi-dimensional scaling) approaches applied to identify
significant semantic relationships in the corpus will be discussed. Finally, the
application of this research to improving the indexing and retrieval of
digital images in the context of the EU project Tripod will be presented.
Research Interest
My research is broadly concerned with better understanding the ways in which people
experience and comprehend geography directly in everyday life and how GI
technologies might better support the provision of information is such situations. In
particular, I am interested in how the concept of /Place/, particularly from Human
Geography and Environmental Psychology, might be used to provide guidance in the
modelling, indexing, retrieval and presentation of geographic information in emerging
technologies. Previously, I explored these issues in relation to location based services
to visitor of natural and recreational areas, considering how place could guidance in
designing such systems. Currently I am addressing these issues in the project Tripod
which is concerned with describing place to support the indexing and retrieval of
photographs.