SOCoP Meeting Minutes from  Wednesday SOCoP Meeting April 20 2011 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT

Attendees-Participants: Gary Berg-Cross (Knowledge Strategies),  Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin), Mike Dean (BBN Tech), James Wilson (James Madison) Todd Pehle (Orbis Tech), Dalia Varanka (USGS) 

The main Agenda was to continue discussing what each of us is doing for INTEROP and planning out the upcoming months.

1. NSF
James reported that he had received word that he had received NSF student REU grant for one year.  Nancy had also received some notification to that effect but had not checked the details.

There was no update on visits from Mimi McClure.

2. ACM GIS, Terra Cognita and AAG Workshops
Nancy noted that she had drafted a proposal for a seession at ACM SIGSPatial GIS in Chicago at the end of October. Mike thought that the draft proposal that Nancy sent out to check for interest looked good.  This is a draft so we haven’t heard back yet.  Official submission is May 1. 

There was no update on the Terra Cognita status.  Proposals were due April 15 so they probably haven't been reviewed, but Mike will check.

Nancy and James attended the recent AAG workshop where we had a session and a meeting on collaboration efforts.

Nancy reported that there weren't a lot of people in the semantics session at AAG.  We had only 7-8 other than the speakers, but it was good. James Wilson and Ola were there but Dalia had to cancel. Rob Raskin's and Josh's talks were great. Taowen from New Zealand presented land cover integration work (this was work done with Mark Gagehan, who wasn't there).

James arranged a collaborative meeting at AAG with Shaowen and Sean Ahearn.  Shaowen is (unofficially) thinking of inviting our 2 projects (BoK2 and INTEROP) to his annual NSF reporting session at Oak Ridge Tennessee National Lab . He plans on asking his co-PIs about this. The tentative time would be Sept. 28-29 and it woud be a opportunity to bring all of us together and to strengthen proejct ties. Multiple NSF officers will be there as welk as everyone on the CyberGIS project.  We might have to invite Mimi but if this happens it could serve as our project annual meeting. 
We would pay to travel, but there is general travel budget to meet at NSF and this would substitute for this.  We would all be giving reports and work on further synergy. 

One rationale for this was provided at one of Shaowen's AAG sessions, where the NSF panel members indicated they were looking for an established group of GSS researchers with coordinated efforts when considering future funding. The Geography and Spatial Sciences (GSS) at NSF believe that it is helpful if people coordinate. So, a joint meeting/reporting meeting would be valuable to advance coordination.

There is a question of how we would collaborate with CyberGIS.  How would ontology be involved in their Cloud architecture? Maybe there are tools to share. Nancy thought that she could possibly involve the Condor project folks in Madison to help with this.
We do know that CyberGIS is somewhat limited on semantics.  

Nancy noted that at Sean's AAG session he presented slides on the BoK2. We would like to have some synergy on educational material with this effort.
Their 2 year project is to build a software framework and apparently then they'll apply for additional funds to populate the framework with geographic-type information. He showed a mock-up using Second Life in which a 'person' can read poster boards in a room, then go to another room to see more, etc.  It was very flashy and is part of their emphasis on visualization.   They are building SW framework including visualization tools. But they also have a role for ontology. One issue is how to bring things like ontologies into BoK2.

Nancy noted that Sean was going to the AGILE (Assoc of GI Labs in Europe) conference on GI-Science April 18-21 in the city of Utrecht. See http://www.uu.nl/faculty/geosciences/en/agile2011/Pages/default.aspx 

3. ODISSEE Workshops
 Gary was contacted by Lowell Vizenor (Alion Science and Technology) about a SOCoP and GeoSemantic presentation at the Ontology Driven Implementation of Semantic Services for the Enterprise Environment (ODISSEE) 2011 Workshop.  He suggested that Dave Kolas would be good for this and Dave agreed to present.   No one had seen the slides he used for his talk called "GeoSPARQL: Using the SPARQL Query Language for Geospatial Information" but these would be a good resource for the group to have. 

4. VoCamp
Gary and Todd provided an update on the June Vocamp workshop at the Library of Congress June 3-4.  There was some initial confusion about it being a totally focused VoCamp on just geospatial topics or one that is open to other topics.  We expect a mix with perhaps 20-25 people coming for discussion of geospatial vocabularies and participating in geospatial breakout sessions. Dalia will come and gotten the word out so others from USGS may come.  However no USGS "programmers" can come since the old staff is leaving and the new ones are not yet on board.
Dalia did get a call from Bureau of Land Management CTO Pat Stingley who will come and bring some people. Pat was formerly with EPA and known as the "cloud czar".
See http://www.cloudbook.net/community/contributors/patrick-stingley 

Todd mentioned that there is a new site called GeoVocab.org There is a link to it on our VoCamp. Among other things they have a geometry model.  

One question was whether anyone from the Southampton VoCamp is coming.  So far we have not heard although Gary has mailed John Goodwin about it. Currently there is no travel budget for European collaborators for this workshop and not much though has been given to future ones.  Some people, such as Glenn Hart, do come to workshops such as AAG.  He was at the April AAG meting, but Nancy couldn’t find him.

5. Other Workshops

It was not yet clear if anyone going to UCGIS in Boulder this summer.

James mentioned a summer Federation for Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Summer_2011_Meeting that includes Environmental scientific collaboration using science. This might be nice for our portal and keep the dialog going on how semantics fit into these. Nancy read list of topics on environment that would be covered there. James could go to the meeting in Santa Fe, if funded.  

Discussion from the Ontology Summit 
Gary provided an update on his “recruiting” activities at the Summit held at NIST. 
A major one was that Mike Gruninger from University of Toronto who expressed an interest in some joint work.  Mike is interested in collaboration with different communities on research and ontological applications. Mike's group is centered on ontologies and has supported development of the OOR, so they are up to speed on the technical issues. Mike talked about “practical semantics” and the need high quality sharable and reusable expressive ontologies.  He also understands the need an ontological infrastructure for organizations to grow and no one organization can afford to develop this by themselves, so need some common effort that all organizations can use and then tailor to their need. This is in the spirit of our INTEROP effort.

But Mike also has an interest in geospatial things and there is a student who can support some work in this area. We could cooperate on over the next year or 2 and perhaps present at our workshops.  They may have some ideas on a how to use ontologies (and maybe their tools such as COLORE) to solve some of the problems geoscientists have.
A next step is to develop a specific proposal perhaps starting with a Use Case.    

Gary talked to Nicola Guarino about related work in Europe.  Nicola had several suggestions on people to contact for this including at Leeds. He also suggested developing a SIG through IAOA and Gary will look into this. Nocola is part of one of the  new European FuturICT flagship proposal (http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT_ “intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to. “

“The FuturICT flagship proposal will produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis. Go here to find out more about FuturICT., which involves physicists, expert in sociological, data mining experts to do massive data mining/harvesting of information on the web. This is a bit of techno-social work. 

Note - previous European Flagship projects have some relation to cyberinfrastructing included several e-Infrastructures (electronic research infrastructure) projects that funded research and collaborative projects and generate, exchange and preserve knowledge.

Nancy McPherson is interested in models of building and geospatial concepts.
She is on the “Places & Spaces Mapping Science Advisory Board”. She has forwarded our Wiki links on to that committee so we can start pulling these threads together for a possible use case. 
One of the co-members is Andre Skupin at San Deigo State U who is hoping to talk with us at some point especially about ontologies, and geospatial things.  Andre wants to attack the problem of “eyes glazing over when you say ontologies to geospatial people.”

Nancy McPherson is likely to come to the workshop in June, and has a poster exhibit which could be brought along also. Katy Borner at Indiana University who leads the Mapping Science effort has been talking with Library of Congress already about collecting these maps. She will try to set up an appointment with her contact to discuss how these maps fit with other data visualizations or items in the collection.

Other Use Cases
Gary had about 3 use case conversations with some promises to talk further about these from NIST (soil, buildings), Simon Spero at UNC has some people that are discussing geography vocabularies) and Date One project, which Peter Yim is on - see https://www.dataone.org/

Other contacts with some interest:

•	Bill Anderson – has tools and suggested some free ones that we might use.
•	Ram Sriram Ram is at NIST and co-hosted the summit. Gary will meet with him to discuss their efforts that might be featured as part of our work. Among other things are greenhouse gas measurements which has a large data set of work.
•	Fabian Neuhaus, also at NIST is supporting some ontology work at NIST and has asked Gary to present a case for Ontologies to the group he works with.
•	Simon Spero – interested in vocabularies and may come to our Vocamp 
•	Mills Davis – who may be able to provide ideas on semantic technology tools that could be used as part of our infrastructure.
•	sGeorge Strawn at NITR has developed slides to explain the semantic web  to program people and has agreed to let us post and use his material. 
•	Hasan Sayani who is introducing ontology as an academic topic at UMD 

6. HubZero and Wiki
There was no update on the design of HUBzero from Cid at UW Madison.  Gary has structured and staged some material on the current Wiki so that it can be moved over when the HUBzero instance is ready.  One of the first things will be to set up a coordinated project schedule/calendar.
s
The next meeting is targeted for May 25, 2011