Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The Web has made people smart. It allows the everyday people to discover, publish, and share information. The Web is a profound technology not only because it allows the display of pretty pictures and the layout of well-formatted texts, but also because it’s a technology that everyone can use.

Like the Web technology, geospatial technology should also be developed for the everyday people. The key is to help everyday people, not just few groups of elite techno-geeks, to do more by doing less.

So, what’re those useful geospatial technologies? Many speakers at the Where 2.0 conference have talked about them.

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Title: The Geospatial Web — How Geo-Browsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society.

Description: You are cordially invited to submit chapters for an upcoming book on the Geospatial Web, published by Springer London in the Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series.

By integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories, the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products. This edited volume will bring together high quality contributions on the technical foundations of the Geospatial Web, present information services and collaborative environments built on top of geo-browsers such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind, and investigate the economic and societal impacts of such knowledge-intensive applications.

A particular focus of the book is the integration of geospatial and semantic technology, for example to extract geospatial context from unstructured textual resources.

Important Dates:

• Oct 10, 2006: Paper Submission Deadline
• Nov 01, 2006: Notification of Acceptance
• Dec 01, 2006: Camera-ready Copy of Final Chapters Due
• May 31, 2007: Publication

For more information, visit http://geoweb.know-center.at/. Download a copy of the CFP in PDF.

Geospatial ontologies are formal representations of geographical concepts and relations. At the Networking Geospatial Information Technology, Jerry Hobbs of ISI gave an interesting presentation on understanding and developing geospatial ontologies.

His thesis is that in order to develop geospatial semantic web applications, we must first develop a core theory of geospatial and other spatial representation and reasoning. In particular, he discussed ontology development from a natural language perspective — e.g., how do we model queries such as “How long is chile?”, “How large is N. Korea?”, “How far is LA from Washington DC, as the crow flies?”

He also brought up a lot of interesting issues such as scales and half orders of magnitude.

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RDF/A is a syntax for layering RDF information on any XML document, via attributes. GeoRSS is a syntax for annotating geographical information in RSS feeds. In the past, I’ve showed examples using RDF/A.

Today I saw James Fee blogging about GeoRSS. I thought it will be interesting to try to mix GeoRSS and RDF/A.

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Swoogle is a Semantic Web search engine developed by researchers at the Ebiquity Research Group at UMBC. As of June 5th, 2006, the Swoogle crawler has found 1.5 million semantic web documents.

These 1.5M documents comprise about 1M RDF documents, 350K documents with embedded RDF data and 150K documents that look like Semantic Web documents but are currently inaccessible or fail to parse properly. About 3000 new documents are discovered each day. We estimate that of the 1M RDF documents, about 1% (10K) are ontologies, as opposed to data, examples or test files.

Here is how you can discover geospatial ontology using Swoogle.

(1) Find any ontology documents that mention keyword “geo”

• Enter search string “geo“

(2) Find only OWL documents that mention keyword “geo”

• Enter search string “hasFiletype:owl geo“

(3) Find only RDF documents that mention keyword “geo” and “latitude”

• Enter search string “hasFiletype:owl geo latitude“

(4) Find any ontology documents that mention keyword “geometry” but not “algebra”

• Enter search string “geometry NOT algebra“

(5) Find all RSS feeds that contains the term “geo”

• Click on the “document” search option on the top of the search box
• Enter search string “hasFiletype:rss geo“

For more search options, see Swoogle user guide.

Ontology is a key foundation of the Semantic Web. Without ontology, it will be difficult for applications to share knowledge and reason over information that is published on the Web. However, it is a serious mistake to think that the Semantic Web is simply a collection of ontologies.

Last week I was invited to be on a panel discussion at the Humans and the Semantic Web Workshop. I talked a bit about the Geospatial Semantic Web and its associated research issues. Overall the workshop went very well. You can read about the notes from the workshop here.

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I bookmarked few RSS feeds of search queries from ask.com. These feeds collect daily blog posts that are related to “geospatial semantic web“, “semantic web“, and “GIS geospatial“. Links to those feeds can be found in the “Bookmarks” page.

RSS feeds of search queries are nothing new. All major search engines offer this service. However, there is something novel about how ask.com builds its blog search capability. According to this press release, the search capability is built on the blog subscription information from the popular blog reader application — bloglines.com.

Ask Blog & Feed Search takes an entirely new approach to searching the blogosphere. First, instead of crawling, Ask Blog & Feed Search harnesses the subscription data of hundreds of thousands of real people who use Bloglines to create our search index.

“On the blogosphere, people provide the best way to discover the freshest, highest-quality feeds — information that isn’t exposed to crawlers,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask.com. “In addition, this ‘collective human intelligence’ provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low-quality content.”

For more comments about ask.com’s new blog search capability, see also eBiquity and TechCrunch.