Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

These days it seems like everyone has a camera phone, and everyone posts photos on Flickr. Wouldn’t it be great if photos taken on your camera phone can be automatically tagged with location information and then published onto Flickr?

Check out ZoneTag.

ZoneTag can automatically tag your photos with the location, based on the cell tower, in which they were taken. ZoneTag is known to work on 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 models, and it is likely to work on 3230, 6630, 6260 as well

Of course, it has some limitation.

The location of the cell tower is not known until our user community updates the city, state, or zip code of their photos on Flickr.

I don’t have a Symbian phone, so I can’t try it out. If anyone has a chance to play with this software, please let me know what you think.

If Semantic Web research is about annotating data on the Web, then Semantic Web Service research is about annotating functions on the Web. Semantic Web Service research started about the same time as the Semantic Web research. But it did not receive the same publicity as the parent Semantic Web development.

As Martin Hepp puts it, “[Semantic Web Services] are widely regarded as the ‘ugly stepchildren’ [of the Semantic Web]”. In his recently article, Hepp discussed why it’s wrong to think Semantic Web Services are less important than those systems that solely focused on annotating static web content and information that stored in databases.

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RDF is a knowledge representation language. When using RDF to describe existing metadata on the Web, we often run into the problem of having two copies of the metadata: one in HTML and the other in RDF.

RDF/A is a new language syntax for embedding RDF metadata within XHTML. This new language syntax is introduced in a recent W3C Working Draft — “RDF/A Prime 1.0“.

Here is an example how one can embed FOAF description directly in an XHTML page:

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OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) published two online multimedia demonstrations documenting the milestones achieved in the OGC Web Services Phase 3 Initiative, (OWS-3). The goal of OWS initiatives is to promote and demonstrate the use of various OGC open geospatial specifications.

In OWS-3, participants worked in the following areas:

• Common Architecture
• Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
• Geo-Decision Support Services (GeoDSS)
• Geo-Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM)
• Open Location Services (OpenLS)

I watched the video, and I think it’s well made. The demo also gives a good overview of what OGC does and the importance of data interoperability.

An official announcement from OGC is available online.

Gigi and I are on vacation in Hong Kong for two weeks. The main purpose of this trip is to visit our families, do a lot of shopping and eat a lot of good food. Since the Hong Kong Tourism Board is naming this year “2006 Discover Hong Kong Year”, let me do some citizen duty by marketing Hong Kong tourism using Google Earth.

There is not much Hong Kong landmarks in Google Earth. I spent few minutes going through the satellite photos and found few places that I think a typical tourist may be interested to visit.

This Google Earth KMZ file describes the following Hong Kong landmarks:

• Hong Kong International Airport
• Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
• Ocean Park
• Happy Valley Racecourse

Once you’ve opened the file in Google Earth, click on the “link” node under each landmark entry. It will bring you to a Wikipedia page that talks the history background of each landmark location.

See this site for more Hong Kong tourism information.