Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Brian Suda prototyped an XSLT transformation service for transforming documents with Microformat Geo markups to GeoRSS and Google KML representation. The XSLT files used by the service are available for download.

Microformat Geo is a simple format for marking up geographical latitude and longitude information within XHTML, XML and RSS. Its representation originates from the vCard standard (RFC2426).

I think this service is interesting for the following reasons:

1. As Microformat gaining traction in the Web community, we need this kind of services to bridge the representation between Microformat geo and others (e.g. GeoRSS, KML and W3C Geo).
2. It demonstrates the feasibility to use existing technology such as XSLT to enable information sharing and integration on the Web. Mapping and integration at the syntax level should be the first step, and mapping between ontologies and semantics should be the second step.
3. It’s a strong evidence that shows the realization of the Semantic Web doesn’t dependent on a single ontology. Multiple ontologies, even competing ones, can live in harmony and used by different applications simultaneously. I can imagine using services like this will enable Google Earth to display data expressed in GeoRSS, which is embraced by Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Maps to display data expressed in KML, which is the proprietary format of Google Earth.

Spotted in a message posted by Danny Ayers to the mailing list of W3C Geospatial Incubator Group.

UMBC Ebiquity Group reports how W3C geo vocabulary is currently used in semantic web documents. The analysis is done using the statistics compiled by Swoogle — a Semantic Web search engine and crawler. Swoogle currently knows about 500,000 semantic web documents and 300,000,000 RDF triples.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Geo is currently the 10th highest ranked vocabulary according to Swoogle’s ontology ranking algorithm
• About 240,000 documents reference geo’s namespace
• Top used namespace abbreviation for this ontology is “geo”, “pos” and “wgs84_pos”
• Instances of geo:Point appear far more often in the range value of foaf:base_near property than all other referenced properties combined (close to 100,000 : 1).
• Property geo:long (longitude) and geo:lat (latitude) are often used by instances of geo:Point. Other instances that use these two properties include instances of the Airport class from airport-ont, geo:SpatialThing, dc:image, rdfs:Resource, foaf:Image, and foaf:Person. (see the full list for geo:long and the full list for geo:lat).
• Property geo:alt (altitude) is not used very often in comparison to geo:long and geo:lat.

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The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. annouced the release of the “OGC GeoRSS White Paper“.

GeoRSS is a simple proposal for geo-enabling, or tagging, “really simple syndication” (RSS) feeds with location information. GeoRSS standardizes the way in which “where” is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to describe the location of Web content. It is extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC GML (Geography Markup Language®).

GeoRSS is an important stepping stone in the evolution of the geo-semantic web. It is the product of an informal collaboration of geospatial professionals applying expertise in Web standards, syndication, and the Semantic Web. An incubator group within W3C is working to progress things further (see www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/charter). This incubator activity represents an important link between the OGC and W3C communities to address the growing importance of the Semantic Web and the need for locally relevant information accessible through a variety of networked devices.

Spotted on Directions Magazine.

Not too long ago I wrote about a Semantic Web idea of using GeoRSS and Geonames to enhance Kiva.ORG’s user interface. Mikel Maron wrote me today, and told me that he has put up a map of Kiva loan applications using the technologies that I’ve described.

The map application takes an RSS feed of Kiva’s loan applications and augments the content with geographical coordinates information using the Geonames’s RSS to GeoRSS Converter service. The resulting geocoded RSS feed is then fed to Mapufacture.

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On the way home yesterday I was thinking about useful location-based services (LBS). In particular, I was imagining the kind of LBS that would be useful to the everyday mobile phone users.

Here is a list of imaginary LBS that came to my mind:
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Tim Berners-Lee was challenged by Peter Norvig, Google Director of Search, at a recent artificial intelligence conference sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Tim’s belief is that in the future “Web developers will use semantic languages in addition to HTML. He stressed the importance of using persistent URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) for identifying information. Consistent use of these specifications, said Berners-Lee, will allow the Semantic Web to maintain the collaborative nature the World Wide Web was originally intended to have.”

At the end of Tim’s speech, Peter challenges Tim with the question that is it really feasible to get Web developers to use semantic languages, given that many of them can’t really configure web server and can’t write HTML?

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I heard about Kiva.ORG in a BusinessWeek podcast. After visiting its website, I think there are few places where GeoRSS (in the RDF/A syntax) and Geonames can be used to enhance the site’s functionality.

Kiva.ORG Background

It’s a microfinance website for people in the developing countries. Its business model is in the intersection between peer-to-peer financing and philanthropy. The goal is to help developing country businesses to borrow small loans from a large group of Web users, so that they can avoid paying high interests to the banks.

For example, a person in Uganda can request a $500 loan and use it for buying and selling more poultry. One or more lenders (anyone on the Web) may decide to grant loans to that person in increments as tiny as $25. After few years, that person will pay back the loans to the lenders.

How GeoRSS and Geonames Can Help

I went to the website and discovered the site has a relative weak search and browsing interface. In particular, there is no way to group loan requests based on geographical locations (e.g., countries, cities and regions).
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Information overflow is persistent problem in enterprise computing. Users in this environment are usually flooded with information that can’t be easily processed due to their limited resources (e.g., time and financial cost). One way to solve this problem is to explicitly represent the semantics of this information, so that it can be better searched and presented to the users.

Thetus Corporation is one of the companies that adopt a semantic-approach to solve information overflow problems. The basic framework of Thetus’s software system evolves around the idea of unifying distributed data into a single semantic structure.

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