Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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 Web has made people smart. It allows the everyday people to discover, publish, and share information. The Web is a profound technology not only because it allows the display of pretty pictures and the layout of well-formatted texts, but also because it’s a technology that everyone can use.

Like the Web technology, geospatial technology should also be developed for the everyday people. The key is to help everyday people, not just few groups of elite techno-geeks, to do more by doing less.

So, what’re those useful geospatial technologies? Many speakers at the Where 2.0 conference have talked about them.

Read the rest of this entry »

People may think the present Web is ubiquitous because much of our daily activities revolve around the Web. But this thinking is not completely correct with respect to the kind of ubiquitous computing that Mark Weiser had envisioned. W3C will host a workshop to explore the synthesis of the Web and Ubiquitous Computing.

What is the “Ubiquitous Web”?

Ubiquitous means something that is often encountered and seemingly present everywhere. Ubiquitous computing, as described 15 years ago by Mark Weiser, postulates a world where people are surrounded by computing devices that are interconnected via networks, and which support us in everything we do. Despite the success of the World Wide Web on the desktop, we have only just begun to tap the potential provided by the increasing range of devices in use.

The Ubiquitous Web seeks to broaden the capabilities of Web browsers to enable new kinds of Web applications, particularly applications that coordinate with other devices and adapt dynamically to the user, device capabilities and environmental conditions. Applications will be able draw upon network services to extend device capabilities. People will be able to focus on what they are doing rather than on devices. Application mobility will allow people to keep working or playing while seamlessly switching from one device to another.

The ESRI Federal User Conference (FedUC) is January 31–February 2, 2006, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The conference supports those who deploy ESRI software for geoprocessing and analysis, integrated work flows, and intelligent collaboration across government. (source blog)

Going through the program schedule (pdf), I see a lot of interesting application domain that could exploit Semantic Web technology. I think the use of ontologies and RDF can be useful in the following domains:

• Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure: the Year of Alignment (page 3)
• WMD Response in a Joint Civil and Military Environment (page 6)
• GIS for Homeland Security and Emergency Management (page 8 )
• Preserving GeoSpatial Data (page 12)

I’m quite disappointed to see the word “semantic” is not mentioned anywhere in the entire 27 pages document. The word “intergration” is mentioned is 15 times. Do people really believe that knowledge integration problems can be solved without some kind of understanding of the semantics?