Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Computer science is a relatively new field of science comparing to others such as Biology and Physics. However, its scientific advancement has as much impact as other sciences in shaping our society and culture.

Advanced computing technology makes possible for us to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. It brings about low-cost telecommunications and global electronic marketplaces in the business world. Digital maps (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, etc.) change the way we seek location information and enable us to use maps as a visualization tool to present information. In culture, devices such as iPods and cameraphones change the way we think about fashion and style; web sites like myspace.com and YouTube define how digital information is shared and social relationships are established.

What’s next? This is the question pondered by a group of computer scientist at a recent Columbia University symposium titled “2016″.

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Dave asked if he can use the same URI for both his FOAF profile and OpenID HTML page. I thought I had to use RDFa or Microformats to solve the problem. But then, a quick Google search I found a simple solution from RDF in HTML.

I added few FOAF statements about myself in my OpenID HTML page. It passed W3C RDF validator test, and I can successfully sign on to livejournal.com.

Do you know other approaches that will enable the use of one single URI for both FOAF profile and OpenID HTML page?

Managing multiple sets of sign-on information (username and password) is a task that many people hate. I often forget either the username or the password for a less frequently visited web site, and sometimes I forget both. OpenID is an emerging framework that attempts to solve this problem. This framework built based on a simple idea that users on the Web can be uniquely identified by URI.

As popular web sites such as Zooomr, Livejournal and Technorati begin to support OpenID, I wonder if we can use OpenID for identifying people and discovering the semantic description about them on the Semantic Web?

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Geonames announced the release of its Geonames ontology v1.2. The new ontology has few enhancements. It introduced the notion of linked data and made clear distinction between URI that intended for linking documents and for linking ontology concepts.

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To some people, news sites such as Reuters, CNN, NYTimes and Washington Posts seem so “yesterday”. Editors actively decide what news are important and what headline to run on the front pages, and on the other hand, readers passively receives this information. In Web 2.0, personalized news sites do things in a complete reverse. Readers get to decide what articles are important to them, and what headline articles should be ran in the front page.

A recent review showed that Web 2.0 personalized news sites are becoming popular. For a site to be classified as a personalized news site, it typically implements the following 3-steps information flow process:

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Geonames released an ontology of its geospatial information schema in the Web Ontology Language OWL. This ontology directly maps to the DB schema that is used by Geonames data export.

In the rest of this post, I’ll describe key concepts in the Geonames ontology. It may be of interest to readers who want to learn and play with the Semantic Web Geonames.

In this ontology, among others, there are three key ontology classes: Feature, Class and Code. Feature class is a set of all geospatial instances in Geonames (a city, a country etc.). The ontology class Class is a set of all feature schemes defined in Geonames. Not to confuse this ontology concept with OWL Class, which is used to defined classes of ontological things, let’s call Geonames’s Class gn:Class. The class Code is a set of abbreviation feature codes in different feature schemes.

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Certain configuration properties in iPhoto 6.0.5 have led to the speculation that iPhoto may soon to support geotags and display photos on Google Maps. This story was first reported on mactelchat.com, and later was submitted to digg.com.

An evidence offered by the iPhoto hacker (javaster) is that in the iPhoto configuration file, the property key “GPSMapURL” is defined with a Google Maps marker display URL. This URL seems to be related to the “Show” button that is part of the Photo Info dialog box in iPhoto (see below).

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GeoTicTacToe is not a typical location-based game. It’s an attempt to turn a classic 2-D board game into a sportive physical exercise.

In GeoTicTacToe, a predefined geographical area is mapped onto a virtual 3×3 square. Players, equipped with GPS and mobile devices, are expected to travel to the square locations and place their marks (i.e. X or O). Unlike in the classic Tic-Tac-Toe, in GeoTicTacToe players are not required to take turn to place their marks. In other words, players who can run faster may more marks than the others, and thus, increased their chances to win.

This may seem to be a unfair rule. However, according to Christoph Schlieder and his colleagues, this unfairness, and coupled with other spatial configurations, creates new opportunities for location-based game designs.

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