Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Continue with the previous Semantic Web discussion, I gave two more lectures on the subject. The first lecture was on thinking about the Semantic Web in the context of Web 2.0 and the Social Web. The second lecture was an introduction to RDFa and Microformats.

Students were very excited about these topics. Some continued her thinking online.

Next month, we should see more interesting student discussions on our blog. As part of their assignment, students are asked to write about their view of the Web in 2013.

• Subscribe to our class blog.
• List of class lecture slides (grid view)

Microformats is data format standards for embedding semantic information in XHTML documents. Dmitry Baranovskiy created a tranformer application that can output Microformatted semantic information into formats that are suitable for mashup (JSON and XML).

The application is open source, and is hosted on Google Code.

Here is the XML and JSON outputs of my Biosketch page.

The implementation is surprisingly simple but powerful. It relies on XSTL to transform Microformatted content from an XHTML file into JSON or XML. If you want use the application as a web service, follow the instructions here.

The Economist publishes an article on the Semantic Web. Not too technical, it provides a quick overview of what has happened and what could happen.

SOME new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.

Reuters is not alone, of course. Yahoo!, desperate to gain a technological edge over its rival Google, recently endorsed a set of machine-readable formats that will make better sense of the information streaming through the vast universe of web sites it searches.

Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, is one example. Radar has launched a service called Twine, into which users can stuff any link, document or e-mail message they want and hope for some organising principle to emerge. If Twine fails (and reviews of the usefulness of its experimental “beta” version have been mixed) other small firms such as Powerset and Metaweb (also both based in San Francisco) and Hakia and Adaptive Blue (both from New York) stand ready to fill the breach.

Geospatial Web and Semantic Web are two major discussion topics of the Social Web Technologies course. In the past few classes, we talked about GIS, Google Maps API, geotagging and Geonames.

When introducing Geonames to the students, I decided to do a little experiment. I used Geonames as a tool to teach students the basics of GIS and provide them an opportunity to experience a “social-able” Geospatial Web.

An Annotation Competition

The experiment was relative simple. I spent few minutes introducing Geonames to the students. And then, I asked them to play a game. The class was divided into two teams: Team1 and Team2. Using Geonames, the teams competed with each other in identifying landmarks, buildings and roads that are located within the close vicinity of the UMBC campus. Each student signed up for a free Geonames user account. Using the wiki-style annotation tool provided by Geonames, students tried to annotate as many spatial features as they can in 10 minutes. The team produced the most annotated features would win.

To keep track of the features that each team had annotated, students were asked to tag their features using their team ID: “team1″ and “team2″. Using the Geonames search tool, I displayed the real-time progress in front of the class.

• Features identified by Team1
• Features identified by Team2

Lesson Learned

• It’s fun to use Geonames in a collaborative environment. Students enjoyed the process of creating annotations while chatting with each other and arguing about the location of a specific landmark. It was a social-able experience.
• Geonames has a relative open policy for users to make contributions — whatever the user enters, Geonames stores it. In general, this is a good thing. However, this policy can also lead to unintended creations of duplicated data. For example, because students were entering data simultaneously, we frequently saw multiple annotations of the same location were entered and they had different coordinates values assigned.
• It seems that using the Web as a platform can encourage non-GIS experts (e.g., students) to do GIS tasks (e.g., annotation). Not sure if this is an inherent feature of the Web or just because of the UI of Geonames is well designed.