Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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?

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GeoTicTacToe is not a typical location-based game. It’s an attempt to turn a classic 2-D board game into a sportive physical exercise.

In GeoTicTacToe, a predefined geographical area is mapped onto a virtual 3×3 square. Players, equipped with GPS and mobile devices, are expected to travel to the square locations and place their marks (i.e. X or O). Unlike in the classic Tic-Tac-Toe, in GeoTicTacToe players are not required to take turn to place their marks. In other words, players who can run faster may more marks than the others, and thus, increased their chances to win.

This may seem to be a unfair rule. However, according to Christoph Schlieder and his colleagues, this unfairness, and coupled with other spatial configurations, creates new opportunities for location-based game designs.

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It has been five years since the original Semantic Web article appeared in the Scientific American magazine. Where’re we today? Where’re we heading to in the next five years?

In “The Semantic Web Revisited” (IEEE Intelligence Systems May/June 2006), Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, and Tim Berners-Lee dive into the knowledge pool of the Semantic Web and attempt to answer those critical questions.
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If Semantic Web research is about annotating data on the Web, then Semantic Web Service research is about annotating functions on the Web. Semantic Web Service research started about the same time as the Semantic Web research. But it did not receive the same publicity as the parent Semantic Web development.

As Martin Hepp puts it, “[Semantic Web Services] are widely regarded as the ‘ugly stepchildren’ [of the Semantic Web]”. In his recently article, Hepp discussed why it’s wrong to think Semantic Web Services are less important than those systems that solely focused on annotating static web content and information that stored in databases.

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Prof. Max Egenhofer has written a short paper, “Toward the Semantic Geospatial Web“, which discusses key issues in building a new Web that can exploit geospatial semantics. He believes that in order for Semantic Geospatial Web (or geospatial semantic web as I call it) to take off, it will require the development of standard geospatial ontologies for representing data and standard query languages for accessing data.

I believe standard ontologies and query languages only solve part of the problem. In real world geospatial applications, building standard vocabularies and queries langugaes are the easy part of the tasks. The hard part of the problem is how to integrate mass amount of geospatial data that already exists.

• How can we integrate existing geospatial data without needing to create new databases that basically replicate the existing ones?
• How can we query the semantic knowledge that is fused from heterogenous data sources without needing to know the specific representations of these data sources ?
• How can we track the pedigree and provenence of geospatial data in a Web-based information space in which anyone can say anything about everything?
• How can we faciliate the sharing of different types of geospatial data (images, videos, maps etc) in a Web-based environemnt?