Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

We live in a market-driven business world. Companies don’t usually develop new technology just because it’s fun, and consumers don’t usually buy products just because the companies have them in the stock. Market demand is what drives companies to innovate and consumers to spend.

Let’s assume my theory is correct. Technologies of geospatial semantic web probably will share the same fate as other technologies in the world. If there is no market for them, sooner or later, they will disappear and be forgotten. If there is a market for them, they will prosper and make some of us rich.

Today I ask myself: “is there a market for geospatial semantic web?”

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One of the most successful Semantic Web project is FOAF (the Friend of a Friend project). The goal of this project is to create a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

In this blog, I will show how to describe location information in a FOAF profile using latitude and longitude.

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In his recent blog, TimBL advocates everyone who is able to publish web pages to publish a FOAF document and a URI for themselves. Using URI to reference different kinds of resources (e.g., people, places, and things) is a fundamental principle of the Semantic Web.

So what’s URI? How is it different from URN and URL? See this article — The future of the Web is Semantic.

In the Semantic Web, not only people should be given URI, geospatial things should also be given URI. I believe in the future there will be URI for identifying different kinds of geographical information (e.g., URI for a country, URI for a state, URI for a building, URI for a physical location, URI for a lake in the park).

A natural question to ask is who should be the authority on defining these URI and managing them? My answer is the governments.

BTW, for those who are interested in my FOAF profile and my URI:

• FOAF: http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf
• URI: http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen

People may think the present Web is ubiquitous because much of our daily activities revolve around the Web. But this thinking is not completely correct with respect to the kind of ubiquitous computing that Mark Weiser had envisioned. W3C will host a workshop to explore the synthesis of the Web and Ubiquitous Computing.

What is the “Ubiquitous Web”?

Ubiquitous means something that is often encountered and seemingly present everywhere. Ubiquitous computing, as described 15 years ago by Mark Weiser, postulates a world where people are surrounded by computing devices that are interconnected via networks, and which support us in everything we do. Despite the success of the World Wide Web on the desktop, we have only just begun to tap the potential provided by the increasing range of devices in use.

The Ubiquitous Web seeks to broaden the capabilities of Web browsers to enable new kinds of Web applications, particularly applications that coordinate with other devices and adapt dynamically to the user, device capabilities and environmental conditions. Applications will be able draw upon network services to extend device capabilities. People will be able to focus on what they are doing rather than on devices. Application mobility will allow people to keep working or playing while seamlessly switching from one device to another.

Galileo is a new global navigation satellite system developed by the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency to compete with the existing the GPS system, which is operated by the US military. Despite many critics argue that there is little scientific merit in developing Galileo, I believe the benefit of having a new system outweighs any political criticisms that are buzzing the media.

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In order for computing machines to exploit the semantics of geospatial information, information must be explicitly represented. There are two ways to represent geospatial information: symbolic representation and geometric representation.

In this blog, I discuss knowledge representation and different aspects of knowledge representation in the context of geospatial semantic web.

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People can love and hate Google Earth at the same time.

If companies want to put up big advertisement on a billboard down the street, they probably have to pay for it. Thanks to Google’s satellite aerial photo products such as Google Earth and Google Maps. Companies now have a new way to advertise.

Google Earth also reveals a lot of information that governments don’t want you to know. For example, what exactly was going on at Glasgow Prestwick airport the day the Google sat passed over? See “Google Earth fingers CIA rendition flights?“

Mash-up is a buzz word these days. Mash-up applications are applications that exploit two or more distinctive technologies provided by some existing applications and combined them to create new capabilities.

Virtual NYC Tour is an interesting mash-up application that exploit Google Maps and Wiki.

The site, www.virtualnyctour.com, lets users choose from 17 different trails for a “walking tour” of locations such as Soho, Ground Zero and Central Park. A map pinpoints the user’s location while photos show what can be seen along that route (cars, trash bags on the sidewalk, people talking on cell phones, and, oh yeah, amazing architecture). Alongside that are historical and other summaries from Wikipedia.