Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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

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?