SOCoP Meeting Minutes from Wednesday SOCoP Meeting Aug. 25 2010 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT    (2IIF)

 Attendees-Participants Gary Berg-Cross (Knowledge Strategies), Dave Kolas (BBN Technologies), Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin )  Krzysztof Janowicz (Penn State), James Wilson (JMU), Dalia Vernanka (USGS), Mike Dean (BBN Technologies), Carl Diebert (Sandia Labs),  Josh Liebermann (Traverse Technologies), Laura Reece ( TASC)    (2IIG)

Following introductions the following were discussed:    (2IIH)

1. Workplan for 2010 including a. Update on the ongoing Demo development.    (2III)

While Todd could not participate he provided a summary of the demo’s progress. The SameAs service complete enough to use. Here is how it works. One can submit a URI and the service will return owl:sameAs triples for the given URI. The demo also supports a placename search that will return any URIs that has the given placename attached to it (rdfs:label). The other main query operation is a bounding box search that returns any URIs in a given Geo-RSS Box submitted by a client.    (2IIJ)

This search service still needs to be populated with some initial data (as discussed in the previous meeting in concert with available USGS data). When populated it will then plug easily into the Marble Linked Data browser service which is what the user will see and query. Todd estimates that he probably has 1-2 weeks of loose end coding, fixes and data population and the be ready and hosted on the web.    (2IIK)

Followed the summary Josh mentioned that he would also like to revitalize open vocabulary effort that Todd had launched early. This might be useful for query expansion. As a first step to work more directly with GeOSS. They seem to have a long view on some of these things so haven’t made much progress yet. We might help getting to dynamic aspects of managing and using vocabularies. This would start as an online effort to be followed by a meeting. One thought for this was the GISciences next month in Zurich. (GIScience 2010 Sixth international conference on Geographic Information Science, Sep 14-18, 2010 Zurich, Switzerland, Website: www.giscience2010.org). Krzysztof noted that he will be there and doing a demo.    (2IIL)

b. Update on USGS integrated National Map (TNM)    (2IIM)

Dalia provided an update on the USGS data becoming available. There are 2 types of data - we have names (point data) and hydrography-watershed (line/poly data) for all of our sample geographical area datasets converted. Not all of the data are on the download site yet because USGS wants to do more validation before they are released. There is data of the 9 geographical areas:    (2IIN)

 Watersheds: Pomme de Terre, MO; Upper Suwannee, GA-FL; Lower Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red, TX; Lower Beaver, UT; South Branch of the Potomac, WV; and the Piceance-Yellow, CO;    (2IIO)

Urban Areas: Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; and New Haven, CT.    (2IIP)

 Data for the two themes came out to about 8 million triples.    (2IIQ)

USGS is currently loaded SPARQL endpoints onto the shared Virtuoso server and we're using GML to produce small graphics/maps in response to SPARQL queries, so that the results are not just lines of characters.    (2IIR)

As mentioned they are still validating the data as required by USGS culture so the data is not cleared for public use yet but they are aiming for 2 weeks from now. After that the SOCoP community can look at it to see the data makes sense. Dalia indicated that they will handle special requests. The URL to some of the data ( no account needed) is: http://usgs-ybother.srv.mst.edu    (2IIS)

Dalia indicated that Todd and John Carter at USGS are in touch to share data for the demo.    (2IIT)

c. Plans for the Fall workshop and STIDS paper Dave doesn’t have any update on the STIDS paper and after a brief discussion on the paper people agreed that there was not enough time to complete a good paper. Gary reported that we currently have not found a spot to hold a meeting on Oct 26th which is the day before STIDS. He will ask MITRE again about other possible dates.    (2IJE)

3. Update on NSF proposal Nancy checked web site and our proposal has been recommended to the grants division. It may take up to 4 weeks to hear and there are no guarantees but Nancy is hopeful. The result is that we are still in a wait mode. Gary asked if we were to be funded in a few weeks would we try to hold a workshop in fall as discussed in the proposal. Nancy and others thought that it was best to regroup and use the time to update our thinking and reach out to communities so we would be ready for when they would meet. There was some things we might think about in the interim. Nancy had looked into using Hubzero as part of the cyberinfrastructure (see https://hubzero.org/) but has not created an instance at Wisconsin. One thing to think about is a use case (and vocabulary) for a first community with specific examples. People who had read the NSF review noted that they mentioned that we didn’t talk about remote sensing data. This is an important area and Luis Bermudez could perhaps give examples of useful data and maybe a use case.    (2IIU)

James said the remote sensing is a very broad would have to consider which type of observation, satellite or UAV produces the data. Josh noted that there are several discussions within OGC, but also in the wider Sensor Web world, about the level of detail needed to represent observations. There is a conceptual Observations & Measurements model put together by Simon Cox which is not explicitly semantic but carries much of the detail needed to construct an ontology. Others would like to keep it simpler and simple treat observations more as data, with properties which represent measurements of phenomena; there is movement to construct a more dictionary-like ontology of phenomena without referring much to the observation-measurement process. The problem is that simplicity breaks down pretty quickly because the observational process really does matter. This shows up particularly in representations of time. It becomes hard to interpret observations such as satellite images without multiple time indicators - the time the image was acquired, the times it was processed e.g. into an orthophoto, delivered and published, the oldest acquisition time within a given mosaic, the times that imagery will be acquired and available relative to planned activity in an area. Observations/ observing event just become much less useful when one attempts to separate them from the processes that produce them and the phenomena being observed, but it can also be a lot of complexity and subtlety to deal with.    (2IIV)

Krzysztof discussed a few aspect of the semantic tangle on this and how the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group are extending from the earlier math models to metadata and a semantic-enabled version of OGC's Sensor Web Enablement    (2IIW)

The group has a wiki that contains materials, talks, links to ontologies, and so forth: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/Main_Page . One of the key deliverables is a Sensor and Observations Ontology based on OGC's O&M and SensorML. Besides the Semantic Sensor Web, we also started to work on Linked Data and sensors in the W3C group. There will be a workshop on both topics at ISWC 2010, see http://research.ict.csiro.au/conferences/ssn/ssn10 . Together with some colleagues from University of Muenster and 52North we have just published a paper that gives a brief overview and discusses some key challenges. The paper is entitled 'Towards Meaningful URIs for Linked Sensor Data' and available online at: http://www.personal.psu.edu/kuj13/DE2010lsd.pdf . The workshop that was mentioned during the meeting is the 'Linked Spatiotemporal Data' Workshop at GIScience 2010 :http://stko.psu.edu/lstd2010/ .    (2IIX)

4. Other Items or New Business Laura mentioned ontology workshop as part of the Wuhan (aka Yunnan) China study group meeting. See http://www.jtc1sc32.org/ for information on JTC1 Laura will have more information later on SC32/38 status etc. from the workshop.    (2IIY)

Laura also mentioned an NGA metadata summit this Fall that SOCoP might link to our grant effort. Nancy thought that this sounded like a good idea.    (2IIZ)

Laura also thought that individual members might have some additional idea for the Summit about use of ontologies with/for/as metadata for spatial work. If so they can send them to Laura (LAURA.REECE@tasc.com) by the end of the week    (2IJ0)

Josh had one idea about temporal issue in remote sensing timing for imagery issue. metadata frameworks don’t address this and he could write up some of this up for discussion at the Summit.    (2IJ1)

James mentioned Association of American Geographers (AAG) spring meeting in Seattle which will include some discussion of temporal issues:    (2IJ2)

 Space-time analysis is a rapidly growing research frontier in geography, GIS, and GIScience. Advances in integrated GPS/GIS technologies, the availability of large datasets (over time and space), and increased capacity to manage, integrate, model and visualize complex data in (near) real time, offer the GIS and geography communities extraordinary opportunities to begin to integrate sophisticated space-time analysis and models in the study of complex environmental and social systems, from climate change to infectious disease transmission.    (2IJ3)

This special Symposium builds on momentum from a space-time analysis workshop co-sponsored by the AAG, ESRI, the University of Redlands, and University of Southern California in early 2010, as well as several other initiatives during the past few years. Geographers, GIScientists, modelers, computer programmers, GPS/GIS systems scientists, climate change scientists, epidemiologists, ecologists, planners, transportation experts, and others with active research expertise in integrating space–time in GIS and geography are encouraged to participate in this special symposium. This special Symposium will open with plenary sessions led by prominent theorists and pioneers in time-space GIScience and technology research.    (2IJ4)

 See http://www.aag.org/cs/giscienceresearch    (2IJ5)

There being no other Items or New Business the group set a tentative date for the next planned meting as Wed Sept 22nd 2010.    (2IJ6)