Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The ability to represent time and temporal relations is an important aspect of the Semantic Web. W3C recently published a new working draft on Time Ontology in OWL. This work is an updated version of the OWL-Time ontology developed by Jerry Hobbs and Feng Pan.

Before the standardization of the OWL language, Jerry and Feng also worked on a version of the ontology in DAML. Their previous works on time ontologies can be found at Feng’s OWL-Time website.

In the RDF and OWL world, there are at least two different ways to represent time. One way is to use XSD datatypes (e.g., xsd:datetime), and the other is to use OWL-Time. Sometimes people ask me which approach is better for representing time in their applications.

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In the past few years, a large number of Semantic Web programming tools have emerged. A list of these development tools is now available on the ESW Wiki of W3C.

URL: http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools

Should you have new tools to share with the community, feel free to edit the page.

Source: Ivan Herman

MetaCarta GeoParser API is an experimental web service that provides a unified RESTful interface to the MetaCarta LocationFinder and GeoTagger. It takes a document or query string as input and extracts locations referenced in the text. It returns this information in these formats:

• XML in two flavors: “geomarkup” and “locations”
• Javascript for faster import into AJAX apps
• PNG showing the locations

This service is very similar to Geonames search. Both Geonames and GeoParser allow free text search, and both support feature lookup by location names. However, the search of the GeoParser API has few distinctive features that differ from which of the Geonames’s service.

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I heard about Kiva.ORG in a BusinessWeek podcast. After visiting its website, I think there are few places where GeoRSS (in the RDF/A syntax) and Geonames can be used to enhance the site’s functionality.

Kiva.ORG Background

It’s a microfinance website for people in the developing countries. Its business model is in the intersection between peer-to-peer financing and philanthropy. The goal is to help developing country businesses to borrow small loans from a large group of Web users, so that they can avoid paying high interests to the banks.

For example, a person in Uganda can request a $500 loan and use it for buying and selling more poultry. One or more lenders (anyone on the Web) may decide to grant loans to that person in increments as tiny as $25. After few years, that person will pay back the loans to the lenders.

How GeoRSS and Geonames Can Help

I went to the website and discovered the site has a relative weak search and browsing interface. In particular, there is no way to group loan requests based on geographical locations (e.g., countries, cities and regions).
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One of the most successful Semantic Web project is FOAF (the Friend of a Friend project). The goal of this project is to create a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

In this blog, I will show how to describe location information in a FOAF profile using latitude and longitude.

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In his recent blog, TimBL advocates everyone who is able to publish web pages to publish a FOAF document and a URI for themselves. Using URI to reference different kinds of resources (e.g., people, places, and things) is a fundamental principle of the Semantic Web.

So what’s URI? How is it different from URN and URL? See this article — The future of the Web is Semantic.

In the Semantic Web, not only people should be given URI, geospatial things should also be given URI. I believe in the future there will be URI for identifying different kinds of geographical information (e.g., URI for a country, URI for a state, URI for a building, URI for a physical location, URI for a lake in the park).

A natural question to ask is who should be the authority on defining these URI and managing them? My answer is the governments.

BTW, for those who are interested in my FOAF profile and my URI:

• FOAF: http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf
• URI: http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen