we have made our most recent development, the Semantic Annotations Proxy, available as free service. Annotations link from meta-data documents to external, shared vocabularies such as ontologies or gazetteers. The proxy “injects” these references into existing source documents coming from remote Web services without the need to update existing systems. The semantic annotations proxy is available at http://semantic-proxy.appspot.com/
Some its features:
- It is fast: We are working directly on the data streams; sophisticated parsing and caching ensures high-performance.
- It is robust: Changes to the source document, e.g. due to updates to underlying data models, won’t affect the annotations.
- It is reliable: The proxy is running in the cloud. This will ensure scalability and availability.
- It is free: This is a free service, and all code developed for the proxy is open source.
- It is growing: For now we have support for WSDL Web services and the OGC Web Processing Service. Support for other standards is planned, and we will add new document types on request.
For more information, visit the open source project’s website at http://my-trac.assembla.com/sapience.
DOLCE Foundational Ontology in WSML
We are using the DOLCE ontology as framework for most our ontologies, and we use WSML most of the time for writing them down (there are strong reasoners, you are more flexible, and I can do it in Eclipse ;). Well, we always had our own local copy of a WSML Dolce ontology, and I thought its time that we share it. I also created a new project for serving our ontologies (at least temporarily)
E-Book Reader
Last week I bought myself a sony e-book reader (the touch edition). Sometimes I just love reading fiction (especially when it’s snowing outside like now), but I hate buying these books which are then just wasting space in my shelf. The books in my shelf are supposed to be either references or I read them several times. But many books are just like movies: you rent them, watch them, and forget them. Well, so I bought this reader, and I am thouroughly impressed. Double click on any word, and its definition is displayed. It supports highlighting and basic writing functionality (which is enough for e.g. correcting texts). It’s a bit difficult to read complex documents, e.g. PDFs based on Word documents with lots of tables and diagrams. Well, it’s not difficult, it’s simply not possible. But for everything else, it is wonderful.
Sapience & Semantic Annotations in OGC Standards
Our OGC Discussion Paper about Semantic Annotations in Standards is finally online, took us long enough for the final edits. But we are already planning the next version. We discuss how to insert links to external vocabularies or other documentation into existing OGC-compliant metadata (and even data like KML). We realized soon that the theoretical discussion requires some practical implementation. All our implementations, ranging from semantic data integration to semantic validation of service compositions, assume that the Web services or data sets are “already” semantically annotated. We didn’t really care where the semantic annotations come from (we of course thought about user interfaces and so on, but not so much about the implications for existing implementations).
Our new (open source) project sapience has been initiated to address this issue. From the website (I am too lazy to write it all over again):
“The Semantic Annotations API (sapience) comprises libraries giving application developers a simple and fast way to extend their applications with semantic functionality. Existing applications with complex and data models usually lack ways to describe the meaning of the data, which unnecessarily impairs the exchange of data across different applications. This is especially the case for Web services serving arbitrary content which have to be integrated into other applications. Due to our background in Geoinformatics, the libraries have a strong focus on supporting the annotation of geospatial content compliant to standards published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The various libraries have been either developed within scientific research projects, or are results of thesis implementations (ranging from BSC to PhD). The implementations have been refactored and simplified for sapience.”
Modelling animal spreading to track down Osama?
Look here: N. 33.901944° E.70.093746°
When we applied a distance-decay model to his last known location from 2001, the FATA – or Federally Administered Tribal Area – of Kurram had the highest probability of hosting bin Laden (98%). There were 26 city islands within a 20-km radius of his last known location in northwestern Kurram. Parachinar figured as the largest and the fourth-least isolated city. Nightlight imagery also shows that Parachinar is the closest city to his last known location and by far the brightest city by nightlight intensity in Kurram. When we undertook a systematic building search in the city of Parachinar, this approach resulted in three structures that meet all six of them and 16 structures that meet five of them.
source: http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2009/online/finding-bin-laden.pdf
Sounds interesting, right? Geography Professor Thomas Gillespie claims that he can pinpoint Obama Bin Laden, using some serious spatial analysis techniques. I just briefly scanned through the paper. He is using distance decay models, and some knowledge about Osama himself (e.g. his has diabetes and needs a dialysis machine, which makes the stories about him hiding in a remote cave not really believable). Proves how important our work really is…
Poster FOIS 2008
On Friday the conference “Formal Ontology in Information Systems” is going to start. This is the first time I’ve prepared a poster about my PhD for a conference. I am usually having talks. I thought it my be good idea to put my thoughts into a poster, since it is not really difficult (for me) to wrap up my ideas into an article. Posters are kind of more challenging (if you take it serious). You have to omit all the difficult stuff and come to the point. You need to have a catchy introduction, but also some more in depth details which keep the viewer interested. Besides that it’s simply more fun to play around with Inkscape.
Today was deadline for Google’s Project 10^100. They collect unique ideas for projects, with the biggest criteria being that it should as many people as possible. Well - “why not just trying it out” - I thought, and applied for it. Since there was an (optional) video link, and the accepted ideas are getting voted by the community, I installed Camtasia again and produced the following video. What do you think?
According to Wikipedia, desire lines (or social trails) are the trails which manifest on the surface if people heading for a certain destination take a shortcut through the grass. This great post further explains the concept of desire lines, and discusses why landscape architects should take this human behavior into account before planning pathways. The map of the Michigan State University shows an example were architects waited until desire lines emerged and paved them afterwards.
Sometimes we GIScientists struggle with the phenomenon of the rise of geospatial applications in the web (i.e. Google Maps, OpenStreetMaps, Flickr, …). In the past we were told that research is targeting the theoretical foundations of GIScience, and that the stuff we develop is years ahead of the products available on the market. But the web, Virtual Globes, or the abundance of GPS devices changed everything. This all developed so fast that we have a hard time to catch up. In fact, all we can do is to react and try to understand what’s going on.
I like the analogy of desire lines and the ongoing social phenomena of the web. In the past we were the architects who decided how people interact with the concept of space, today we need to study the human behaviour in the web and study the emerging desire lines. And once we know what the people care about we can try to pave the ways and provide the theoretical foundations for the geospatial web.
My spatial neighborhood, my music neighborhood, my friends, my ...
I just read an interesting article about a computational model which tries to capture the evolutational aspects of trust within neighborhoods [1] and trust between strangers. Despite some flaws (I just don’t like the idea of inventing a computation model to simulate human interaction) it raised the interesting question how neighborhood can be defined, and how this concept conflicts overlaps with the often used term social network. We are usually talking about geospatial information, and that’s why we have to be careful applying our (old) view to the nowadays prevailing web-based technologies.
In its usual understanding, neighborhood is determined by spatial proximity. You’re neighbors are living in the house next door, or are countries having a border with your country. Your real-life social network on the other hand is not necessarily constrained by distance. Most of your friends probably live close-by, but you might have friends or other contacts actually everywhere. Real neighborhood is defined by spatial proximity, real social network by .., well, that’s up to you. Real social network is heavenly influenced by spatial proximity, most contacts are also spatially close.
The internet is challenging this view, and interesting examples exist which support this. Last.fm is a website which allows you to upload (scrobble) the music you are at listening to (at the moment). The website then generates, based on your history of music, suggestions (music you might like) for you. One feature is the creation of a list of people having similar music taste (which makes it possible to scan through the favorites and discover new music). This list of people is you neighborhood, because their interest music is similar to yours. The thematic distance is minimized here. Last.fm provides also the option to identify friends, which means to create your own social networks. Experience has shown (and this is reflected in my Last.fm contact list as well) that online social networks are usually overlapping with real life social networks (you tell your buddies about this great new platform, they register, they tell their buddies, and so on..). As already said: your social network consists mostly of friends living close-by. Online neighborhoods are defined by thematic proximity, online social networks overlap with real social networks. And real social networks are highly influenced by geospatial proximity.
Now a special case: online platforms which handle information which is, in some way, related to real objects. Example: experience/rating sites like Dooyoo allow for commenting on restaurants. Before rating a restaurant, one should (preferably) have visited it. And one can assume, that mostly people from the real (spatial) neighborhood of the restaurant are among this list. So, the neighborhood of such online platforms overlaps with your real neighborhood, because the theme here is something within the geographic space. People with same interests (the thematic neighborhood) are mostly people coming from the same region (the spatial neighborhood). Inferring, for example, trust from neighborhoods has to have this in mind before applying any computation models to websites.
[1] The Evolution of Trust and Cooperation between Strangers: A Computational Model, by Micheal W. Macy and John Skvoretz
the hive mind in action
Its actually pretty scary when you see the hive mind focus on something, instead of amusing it self with pron and memes. (link)
Ok, I check reddit daily, but I have no idea about this whole 4chan thing. Yesterday some kid uploaded a (quite lame) video of him beating up a cat. While not necessarily a nice thing to watch, it is obviously not comparable to the recent videos from Gaza. The video went to youtube, from there to 4chan, and then to the usual suspects (digg, reddit, …). I have no idea why, but animal (especially little kittens) abuse seems to trigger something in these 4Chan folks’ minds.
What happened is the kid uploaded the video on youtube where it was promptly seen by a chantard. We are everywhere…
But it got saved by several sources and uploaded to mirrors to keep it for evidence. They googled his youtube user name and found his city name.
They searched facebook for his name, in his town. They found a kid that was similar in appearance and they compared the clips in the video to the scenary in his room. They found it to be strickingly similar so they launched at trying to find his personal information.
They got the wrong address but they eventually got his phone number where they were able to call his mother and verify his name and the name of the cat. Since then they got the real information and contacted the government, PETA, and local police and schools.
(link)
Scary, isn’t it? There is nothing like anonymity if people want to find out who you are.
