Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

UMBC Ebiquity Group reports how W3C geo vocabulary is currently used in semantic web documents. The analysis is done using the statistics compiled by Swoogle — a Semantic Web search engine and crawler. Swoogle currently knows about 500,000 semantic web documents and 300,000,000 RDF triples.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Geo is currently the 10th highest ranked vocabulary according to Swoogle’s ontology ranking algorithm
• About 240,000 documents reference geo’s namespace
• Top used namespace abbreviation for this ontology is “geo”, “pos” and “wgs84_pos”
• Instances of geo:Point appear far more often in the range value of foaf:base_near property than all other referenced properties combined (close to 100,000 : 1).
• Property geo:long (longitude) and geo:lat (latitude) are often used by instances of geo:Point. Other instances that use these two properties include instances of the Airport class from airport-ont, geo:SpatialThing, dc:image, rdfs:Resource, foaf:Image, and foaf:Person. (see the full list for geo:long and the full list for geo:lat).
• Property geo:alt (altitude) is not used very often in comparison to geo:long and geo:lat.

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Prof. Tim Finin posted a video of our first Semantic Web application: ITTalks. It’s a talk announcement system that publishes web contents in both human and machine readable format.

This system was developed under the DARPA DAML program. Part of the existing Web Ontology Language OWL is based on an ontology language (i.e., DAML+OIL) developed under this program. In 2000, semantic web research was mostly focused on how to publish machine readable web contents and annotate web information using shared ontological vocabularies.

If you watch the video and compare the ITTalks system with some recent Semantic Web applications, you see obvious difference in their research focus and feature capabilities.

From my personal perspective, since I have worked on the ITTalks project and still in the Semantic Web field, I think Semantic Web research has evolved from how to define ontologies to how to reasoning with ontologies, from how to publish machine readable contents to how to integrated machine readable contents and their semantics, and from how to build proof-of-concept systems to how to develop commercial quality systems.

I’m looking forward to another five years of Semantic Web development.