Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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

The 2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop: Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics (FEW2007) will be co-located with ISWC 2007 in Busan, Korea on November 12th, 2007.

ExpertFinder is an emerging collaborative initiative with the aim of devising vocabulary, rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices to annotate personal home pages, as well as web pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics.

I think FEW2007 will be an interesting workshop.

People search is a growing niche market on the Web. While nearly 50% of all web searches are done on Google, there is no clear winners in many of vertical search domains (e.g., travel, health and people).

Startup Spock is a leader in the people search domain (others include Pipl, PeekYou and Wink). Spock currently builds its database by scanning Web sites that people regularly post information about themselves and others, e.g., LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook.

I think Semantic Web ontology like FOAF and SIOC will play important role in the development of people search engine. First, we have tons of FOAF and SIOC data running wild on the Web. Second, FOAF and SIOC allow more expressive representation of social network information. Third, people profiles described using these ontologies are more suitable for logical inference. It can help to enable knowledge fusion and data mining. Finally, publishing people profiles and social network information in RDF is less involved than publishing API for accessing back-end databases.

If all social network sites adopt FOAF as the standard vocabulary for expressing user profile, it will be easy for someone to build mashups of social networks across multiple sites (e.g., MySpace + Facebook + LinkedIn). Furthermore, if we treat each user profile as an RDF graph, we will be able to exploit SPARQL query services to query distributed data on the Web and begin to ask complex questions about our human social networks.

SDForum will host a panel discussion on the topic “Will Web 3.0 Finally Give Developers a Read Model Driven Architecture Solution?”. Panelists include Deborah McGuinness (Stanford KSL) and Elisa Kendall (Sandpiper Software). This panel will be moderated by AJ Chen (Healthline.com) and Jeffery Pollock (Oracle).

In this interactive panel discussion we will explore how the Semantic Web family of standards is quietly empowering the decades-old MDA (Model Driven Architecture) community. Despite 20+ years of promises from the software community, the original vision of CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) seems just as elusive as ever. However, recent activities in the past 18 months at the OMG (Object Management Group) indicate that another watershed moment for MDA is upon us. So, the question remains, can the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technology like OWL (Web Ontology Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) substantially improve the ways we conceptualize, design, code, and generate enterprise software?

Event information:

• 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM July 30, 2007
• Cubberly Community Center, 4000 Middlefield Road, Room H-1, Palo Alto, CA 94105 (map)
• $15 at the door for non-SDForum members.

About SDForum.

SDForum is the leading Silicon Valley not-for-profit organization providing an unbiased source of information and insight to the technology community for the past 23 years. SDForum provides a venue for engineers, executives, researchers, technology leaders, and venture capitalists to exchange information on emerging technologies and best practices. SDForum reaches 12,000 software professionals annually through more than 20 events each month.

Readers who are in the Bay Area should also consider attending other SDForum SIG meetings. See its Calendar page for details.

Spotted on: SICOP-Forum

The Geospatial Web is an edited volume that summaries the latest research on the Geospatial Web.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in geospatial Web technology. It gradually exposes the reader to the technical foundations of the Geospatial Web, and to new interface technologies and their implications for human-computer interaction. Several chapters deal with the semantic enrichment of electronic resources, a process that yields extensive archives of Web documents, multimedia data, individual user profiles and social network data.

Taking a quick look at the table of content, I find the book to be interesting from two different perspectives. One, it covers a broad range of Geospatial Web topics — from basic research to real-world applications. Second, it includes several chapters that cover the cross-fertilization of geospatial and Semantic Web technology. Topics that I find to be especially interesting: location-based Web search, extracting geospatial semantics from documents, geospatial communities and ubiquitous cartography.

This book will be shipped on May 18, 2007. You can pre-order it on Amazon.

GeoS 2007 — Mexico City, Mexico.

The second edition GeoS 2007 www.geosco.org aims at providing a timely forum for the exchange of state-of-the-art research results in the areas of modeling and processing of geospatial semantics. Geospatial semantics play an important role for next-generation spatial databases and geographic information systems, as well as specialized geospatial web services. This conference will bring together researchers whose expertise will address such issues as:

• Theories for geospatial semantic information
• Formal representations for geospatial data
• Models and languages for geoontologies
• Alignment and integration of geoontologies
• Integration of semantics into spatial query processing
• Similarity comparisons of spatial datasets
• Ontology-based spatial information retrieval
• Ontology-driven GIS
• Geospatial Semantic Web
• Multicultural aspects of spatial knowledge

Important dates:

• Paper submission: June 15, 2007
• Submission of camera-ready papers: August 30, 2007
• Conference: November 29-30, 2007

In an email to the GeoXG mailing list, Carl Reed points us to the Wiki of the XMML project. The site has a set of excellent resources on GIS standards and their background history. For example, you can find answers to

• What’s ISO/TC 211?
• What’s GML? How does it relate to OGC Web Services?
• Why is it important to define languages for expressing an explicit representation of geographic information?

You can also find an overview of GIS standards: General Feature Model, Coverage Model, Feature Type Cataloguing, Maintenance and Governance, Spatial, Temporal and Coordinate Reference Systems etc.

According to a December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, tagging is gradually becoming a popular culture among the US Internet users.

28% of the US Internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of the Internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

The proportion of women and men who tag is about equal — 29% men vs. 27% women. Other demographics are as the follows.

Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.

Taggers are considerably more likely to have broadband connections at home, rather than dial-up connections. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers, while online minorities are a bit more likely than whites to be taggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nova Spivack has some interesting thoughts on the Semantic Web future. His company Radar Network, a software company funded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, is developing a new semantic platform and online service for group communications and collaboration.

In his essay Minding the Planet: the Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web, Spivack discusses important issues that surround the present Semantic Web development and the future Web.

But what is the Semantic Web, and why does it matter, and how does it enable collective intelligence? And where is this all headed? And what is the long-term fa future going to be like? Is the global mind just science fiction? Will a world that has a global mind be good place to live in, or will it be some kind of technological nightmare?

Read the rest of this entry »