Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

This blog will be very quiet next week because I’m on vacation in Europe. I’ve selected few blog posts and web links. For those who are new to this blog, you may find them to be interesting.

• Digital Facsimile: Google Map of Mexcio in 1550
• Mixing RDF/A with GeoRSS
• Searching Geospatial Ontologies in Swoogle
• Semantic Web Services — The Ugly Stepchildren
• The New Sense of the Web, OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook, January 03, 2006. (podcast)
• The Quest for Reliable Directions, NRP, January 10, 2006. (podcast)

Flickr announced a new feature that allows users to geotag photo — i.e., annotate photos with location information such as latitude and longitude coordinates. Unlike typical keyword annotation where users manually enter text strings of keywords, Flickr geotag allows users to annotate location information by simply drag-and-drop photos onto a digital map.

Since most Web users are comfortable with online mapping applications (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps), for them to learn to use Flickr geotag shouldn’t be too difficult. Flickr even produced a short video that teaches users how to geotag photos and set privacy protection.

I think Flickr has done a great job building this new feature. First, there is little mention of GIS vocabularies in the whole tagging process (e.g, you don’t have to know what lat/lng is before you can geotag). Second, it has built-in privacy protection. This gives a greater comfort to those who put information on the Web. Flickr users will be in control of the information and not Flickr. Third, the geotag map UI looks better than the one in Yahoo! Maps. To me, it seems to have a cleaner design with less clutter.

Spotted on Anything Geospatial

Recently I bought a new digital camera. In addition its basic features for taking digital photos, it’s also loaded with features that make my photography experience very enjoyable and fun.

If I can wish for one more feature in my new camera, that would be geotagging. I wish my camera can automatically annotate digital photos with location information. In this blog, I discuss the design of a geotag digital camera that I’ve been thinking about.

If you have any insights on this subject, I’m happy to hear from you.

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SenseWeb is a Microsoft research project that attempts to bring real-time sensor data onto the Web. SenseWeb web portal allows users to visualize and query live sensor data in a digital map interface (Windows Live Local), and allows data owners to publish data using a web service interface.

VerySpatial blog has some discussion about this service, highlighting its current implementation strength and shortcomings. A live demo of the service can be found on the SensorMap website.

An important part of the SenseWeb portal design is the modeling of physical sensors, describing different classes of sensors and their respective properties. Interestingly, SenseWeb defines this model using the Web Ontology Language OWL.

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GPS is a technology that people in the modern world can’t live without. But what did we do before GPS? Professor John Lienhard answers this question in this episode of the Engines of Our Ingenuity.

Back in the 1920’s, without GPS, cross country flying was a real challenge. The US Government in 1926 began promoting a primitive but remarkable solution for aerial navigation. The project was to paint names of towns on roofs of barns, buildings, water towers, gas storage tanks, and hangers. Paint the letters ten to thirty feet high — black on a chrome yellow background. Include an arrow pointing to the nearest landing field.

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The term ontology should be no stranger to anyone who studies the Semantic Web. Even if it’s the first time that you’ve heard of this term, you can answer “what’s ontology?” by googling Wikipedia — “an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them.”

On the Web, what counts as an ontology? This is a question that Tim Finin and Li Ding have explored in their paper “Untangling ontologies on the Semantic Web“.

In their research, they analyzed a collection of over 1.7 million Semantic Web documents (RDF documents) that were crawled by the Swoogle search engine. Based on the statistic data from their analysis, they inferred the characteristics of ontologies in the present Web and used this knowledge to answer the question: what counts as an ontology?

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Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension of MediaWiki with semantic technology. Not only users can create and edit Wiki pages, but also they can make semantic assertions. SMW allows users to annotate Wiki contents using various types of knowledge representation constructs.

In this post, I overview the basic features of SMW and show its usage with few simple examples. At the end, I show how semantically annotated Wiki knowledge can be used to enable structured search queries, which are more expressive than the typical free-text search (e.g., Google web search).

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Google announced that it will let business to offer discount coupons to people who use its Google Maps service.

A business will be able to upload information for coupons, including images, and Google will display a link to those coupons when the business name is displayed. Users can then print the coupons and take them to the merchant.

This is a smart business move. While an advertising model such AdWords works well for companies that want to increase web site traffics, this model doesn’t necessary meet the needs of local business such as street-corner pizza restaurants and liquor stores. This new combination of Google Maps and coupon advertising should provide additional revenues for Google.

Source: New at Google: Local Coupons, NYTimes