Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Today Google will release a new version of Google Earth that allows Internet users to view the skies as seen from Earth. This new service called Sky allow users to fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

Spotted on the New York Times and Olge Earth.

OpenURL is a framework for describing and transporting shared metadata about information objects on the Web. It’s a standard defined by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Why do we need OpenURL?

The OpenURL is needed because conventional web links do not take into account the identity of the user: they take all users to the same target. This causes some problems. For example, when more than one institution provides access to copies of the same electronic article, the link from citation to full text should resolve to a copy that is accessible to the user. Since different users have access to different digital libraries, the link should resolve in a user-specific fashion.

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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) published a video demonstration of OGC Web Services. This video was produced in part of the OGC Interoperability Program (IP). IP is a global, hands-on and collaborative prototyping program for rapid development of proven candidate specifications for consideration for consensus adoption and public release by the OGC Specification Program.

In the video demonstration, the use of advanced OGC technology is covered. This includes Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Geo Processing Workflow (GPW), Geo-Decision Support (GeoDSS), Geo-Digital Rights Management (GeoDRM), CAD/GIS/BIM (CGB), OGC Location Services (OpenLS) and Compliance Testing (CITE).

See the video demo page.

The journal of Knowledge Engineering Review recently began publishing abstracts of PhD dissertations in intelligent systems, artificial intelligence and related areas.

About KER

The Knowledge Engineering Review is committed to the development of the field of artificial intelligence and the clarification and dissemination of its methods and concepts. KER publishes analyses – high quality surveys providing balanced but critical presentations of the primary concepts in an area; technical tutorials – detailed introductions to an area; application and country surveys commentaries and debates; book reviews; and a popular ‘from the journals’ section, giving the contents of current journals in theoretical and applied artificial intelligence.

How to submit

Provide the following information in plain text and email it to Peter McBurney:

• Dissertation Title
• Candidate
• Department and University
• Supervisor(s)
• Year awarded
• URL (for further info)
• Abstract (about 300 words)

Source: UMBC Agents List