Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Image Matters LLC announced a new open source social bookmarking and mashup application called gnizr. This application project is currently hosted on Google Code under the Mozilla Public License.

The goal of this project: (1) Provide enterprises and individuals with an out-of-the-box mashup framework for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing Web resources. (2) Create an open source platform for exploring Semantic Web technologies in the context of Social Web. (3) Experiment how different mashup technologies can be brought together to enhance group collaboration and information sharing.

The gnizr design is heavily influenced by Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. It features a del.icio.us-like user interface for tagging and bookmarking. Users can create tag relations using SKOS vocabularies (broader, narrower, and related) and export their saved bookmarks in RDF (in SIOC and Tag Ontology). Saved bookmarks can be viewed in different mashup API (Google Maps, MIT SIMILE Timeline and Aduna Clustermap).

Gnizr Project: http://gnizr.googlecode.com

Google Street view is awesome. You can pan, zoom, and view street level photographs. Unfortunately, this service is only available for major cities in the US. If you want to see street views of Chinese cities, try city8.com (城市吧).

City8.com is Chinese web map service that shows street level photographs of major Chinese cities. The site also features some social web functions. Users can vote on popular city locations and recommend places to eat, shop and play.

A demo video (in Chinese) is available on the front page. Here is a view of the Beijing Tiananmen Square on City8.com.

Spotted on: Virtual China

The W3C Geospatial Incubator Group recently published two reports on geospatial vocabularies and ontologies. The announcement came through the W3C Semantic Web News:

The final reports of the W3C Geospatial Incubator Group has just been published: Geospatial Vocabulary and Geospatial Ontologies. The first document also includes a reference to a GeoOWL ontology that relies on other, existing vocabularies (like GeoRSS or GML). The second document gives an overview of some other, existing ontologies in the area.

These two documents provide a good overview of existing vocabularies and ontologies. Use cases of geospatial ontologies are described in the Geospatial Vocabulary document. Based on my reading, the group has reached an agreement on a model for representing geometry objects (points, lines, polygons, etc.) but not yet on a model for expressing geospatial relationships (within, touches, overlaps, etc.).

GeoRSS seems to play an influential role in the described model. This is a good sign. To application developers, ontology construction is a means to an end. RSS and GeoRSS extensions enabled the creation of many useful applications. Building on these standards will encourage a broader community to embrace a Geospatial Wemantic Web.