SOCoP Meeting Minutes from  Wednesday SOCoP Meeting May 25, 2011 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT

Attendees-Participants: Gary Berg-Cross (Knowledge Strategies), Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin), Mike Dean (BBN Tech), Ola Alquist (Ohio U.),Todd Pehle (Orbis Tech), Dalia Varanka (USGS), John Moeller (JJ Moeller & Associates LLC), Peter Yim (CIM3). 

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

1. NSF
There was no update on a visit from Mimi McClure.  There was mixed feelings, about inviting here to the June workshop in DC since it is not formally organized. People agreed that it would be a ood gesture but that we need to manage expectations.

2. ACM GIS, Terra Cognita and AAG Workshops
Nancy noted that she had drafted a proposal for a session at ACM SIGSPatial GIS in Chicago for Tuesday Nov 1st was accepted. Nancy noted that organizers should attend.
We submitted it with the title “Spatial Semantics and Ontology Workshop” and would be known as SSO. 

Why both Semantics and Ontology?  Some make a distinction and it is OK as a workshop title for now. Dalia and Gary thought that we will mature some of these ideas over the 3 years, but it will be complex process.  It may be good avoid hassling over titles for now.

We need a web site for this workshop. Nancy inquiring if we can do a web page. Gary thought aht some student resources can be used and develop and make a page off of SOCoP page.
Peter noted that the web space is available for hosting -  you can make a site from SOCOoP or Ontology portal space.  There was an issue of what would be the URL?  Maybe something like socop.org/sso-2011. Gary has gone ahead and drafted a page summarizing some of the Call for Papers info.

During the meeting Mike Dean got work that our proposal for Terra Cognita workshop at ISWC 2011 was accepted.  Next year's conference is in Boston.

3. GeoVoCampDC 
Gary and Todd provided an update on the June Vocamp workshop at the Library of Congress June 3-4 including room and hotel logistics.  If Ola cannot attend some provisions have been made for a call in and remote presentation. We expect a mix with perhaps 15-20 people coming for discussion of geospatial vocabularies and participating in geospatial breakout sessions. Dalia will come with Dave Mattli  and has gotten the word out so others from USGS may come, but this is not certain.   As far as we know no one from the Southampton VoCamp (e.g. John Goodwin or Glenn Hart is) coming.  

Gary provided a high-level view of the format and themes.  An outline of the 2 days is on the Vocamp Wiki - http://vocamp.org/wiki/GeoVoCampDC2011. The plan is for there to be a:

•	 General or Domain Independent models secrtion which has been labeled as GeoSpatial. Todd, Jano and others will be involved here and this would include a review of GeoSparql – geometry literals, KML, spatial reference codes, entry level feature types. Todd wants to get some of these ideas down on paper and maybe in later in Knoodl.  
•	Land Use & Landforms ( with Ola and Gaurav & Mark Gahegan)
o	Ola is not yet sure what best form for use in the VoCamp. He plans on providing some material for Land Use/Cover area.  Ola has is a summary of what has been done or Ontology for descriptions of Land use and methods for translating between these. This would be a summary of what would is being used in Land Cover.  He can also cover the FAO ISO TC 211 work at UN on Land Cover Classifications based out of Italy.  John Latham and Anthony Di Gregorio have a description language that is under review as a standard - see http://www.aag.org/galleries/nalcs/CH6.pdf and http://www.fig.net/pub/cairo/ppt/wss/wss_04_vonhagen_ppt.pdf as background. There is also relevant work from Land Cover Data Base (LCDB), Maps ecosystem attributes from satellite, Regional scale 
o	There is also the Land Cover Data Set work by being done in Boston on ground truthing.  One taxonomy is good for forest cover while others are good for agriculture.  So an issue is what data is needed to resolve issues.   This is something that if Ola briefed Mark Gahegan could follow up on in breakout sessions. Indeed Ola and Mark's group had been in touch on common interests. So if Ola can come to the meeting there may be a good discussion of the issues.
 
Dalia is coming to the workshop and might bring an example of some problems the USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center group at Middleton is encountering using hydrology ontologies. Todd also note an interest in merging the lightweight geo-models developed in the sessions with some of the USGS models. The larger plan would be to tie the general models in with some of the Land Use models and possibly an Events model.

Hearing the range of topics Nancy said that she would like to attend all the sessions and wondered if things could be done in sequence rather than in parallel. Currently this didn't seem feasible to cover all the material.

Another question was whether REU students (JMU or WU) might be identified early enough to come. James was not online to ask about this, but can respond later.

4. Other Workshops

Nancy will go to UCGIS in Boulder this summer and talk to the people there. 

5. Other Discussions

Peter Yim had some announcements, the 1st being that  IAOA is contemplating a geoOntology SIG. The chairs would be John Bateman & Werner Kuhn. There is a general IAOA May 26th that will include how to set up SIGs etc.
IAOA doing a summer institute in Florence and has a week on geographic info and process.

Peter also indicated that the DataOne project (https://public-web.dataone.org/) will have a face to face meeting at Santa Barbara in July which may start to produce some work of common interest. 
Note DataONE federated data system highlighted in Science article and DataONE to Deal with Data Deluge

Mike Gruninger from University of Toronto has astudent Torsten Hahmann torsten@cs.toronto.edu who has an interests in what we are doing . We could cooperate on over the next year and perhaps present at our workshops.  Potential ideas from a telecon we had in May include:

1. Apply the ontologies that we are developing in Toronto to
support existing SOCoP use case scenarios.
2. Identify new ontologies that are required to support the scenarios.
3. Evaluate proposed ontologies within SOCoP
4. Support the integration of existing SOCoP ontologies, perhaps
within the context of OOR and COLORE.
5. Can we evaluate the minimal expressiveness for an ontology language
to represent the intended semantics of concept in the SOCoP use case scenarios?

Gary thought that this would be valuable for the effort and would like to proceed.  This would also support some OOR effort as noted in point 4 above.

The next meeting is targeted for June 15, 2011.