Seminar Designed on Geospatial Semantics (37TP)
As part of our educational material, James Wilson developed a seminar course (Geography 465) at James Madison University. The course announcement, syllabus, and readings included in the course are available at InteropProject/EducationalReadings. (37SW)
Tutorial on GeoSPARQL (37TQ)
Dave Kolas from our group was part of the development team for GeoSPARQL. GeoSPARQL adds spatial functions to SPARQL, the W3C standard RDF query language. Here is a draft of the GeoSPARQL USER GUIDE (Jan. 2012) InteropProject/Geosparql_USER_GUIDE_2012 (2VHB)
Geospatial Semantic Body of Knowledge (37TR)
We have a preliminary effort at creating an outline for the basic concepts, terms, knowledge, activity and skills needed for semantic and ontological expertise in the GIScience area. This will be drafted in the general style used in Body of Knowledge (BoK) efforts, particularly following the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GIS&T BOK). (2VHC)
Relevant past efforts in allied fields include: (2VHD)
- DAMA Guide to the Data Management Body of Knowledge (DAMA-DMBOK Guide) (2VHF)
- PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) (2VHG)
- SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) (2VHH)
- BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) (2VHI)
- CITBOK (Canadian IT Body of Knowledge) (2VHE)
In the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge (GIS&T BOK) the Areas are: (2W22)
- Analytic Methods (2W23)
- Cartography and Visualization (2W24)
- Conceptual Foundations (2W25)
- Design Aspects (2W26)
- Data Modeling (2W27)
- Data Manipulation (2W28)
- Geo-computation (2W29)
- Geospatial Data (2W2A)
- DIG&T and Society (2W2B)
- Organizational & Institutional Aspects (2W2C)
- Data acquisition, processing and analysis (2W2D)
As a preliminary focus some material on semantics and ontologies would be added to the Conceptual Foundations Area as well as to the Geospatial Data Area with perhaps some supporting material in other Areas such as Analytic Methods. (2WZB)
The material below provides examples of what might be in these Areas. (2W2E)
Work from the 2010 Ontology Summit suggested 8 Core Knowledge Areas with some breakout into units: (2VIQ)
1.The basic terminology of ontology (relation of ontology to knowledge representation, conceptual modeling, data modeling, ...) (2VIR)
2.Theoretical foundations (2VIS)
- first-order logic, basics of description logic, modal logic, and second-order logic (2VIT)
- set theory (2VIU)
- basic notions of philosophical ontology (universals and particulars, mereology, essence and identity, unity and plurality, dependence, change in time...) (2VIV)
- philosophy of language (the use-mention confusion, sense and reference, speech act theory, ...) (2VIW)
- knowledge representation, conceptual modeling, data modeling; metadata (2VIX)
3.Representation languages Part 1: RDF, OWL; CommonLogic (2VIY)
4.Building and editing ontologies (2VIZ)
- Human aspects (application of classification principles, manual auditing, ...) (2VJ0)
- Software tools (Protégé, ...) (2AU6) (2VJ1)
- Addressing interoperability problems among ontologies (2VJ2)
5.Ontology evaluation strategies and theories (OntoClean, ...) (2VJ3)
6.Examples of ontologies, illustrating different methodologies (2VJ4)
- upper-level ontologies (BFO, DOLCE, SUMO, ...) (2VJ5)
- mid-level, domain-spanning ontologies (PSL, ...) (2VJ6)
- domain ontologies (GO, Enterprise Ontology, ...) (2VJ7)
7.Examples of ontology applications (successes and failures) (2WZC)
1.as controlled vocabularies / standards, to achieve coordination among humans (2VJ8)
- to solve interoperability problems among external data resources (2VJ9)
- reasoning with ontology content (2VJA)
- improve search and retrieval (2VJB)
- Natural language processing (2VJC)
- decision support, situational awareness, information fusion, anomaly detection (2VJD)
8.Ontology and the Web (2VJE)
There is initial material on Ontologies as an artifact for making information explicit and how it is applied, examples of General and Geospatial ontologies, and Ontological Methods that has been drafted by Dr. Gary Berg-Cross and links to standard tutorials on these provided as a draft for the Fall workshops. (2RJM)
Currently a cooperative effort using the BoK2 framework is expected for this and related Geoscience material. (2RJN)