SOCoP Meeting Minutes from Wednesday SOCoP Meeting June 15, 2011 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT

Attendees-Participants: Gary Berg-Cross (Knowledge Strategies), Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin), Todd Pehle (Orbis Tech), John Moeller (JJ Moeller & Associates LLC), and 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.  

2. ACM GIS, Terra Cognita and Fall Workshops
Nancy noted that the first call for papers for our Spatial Semantics and Ontology Workshop (at ACM SIGSPatial) went out with due date around July 21. We may have to make some modifications to dates as we go along.

Nancy had no update on the possible joint meeting with Showen’s CyberGIS group (and maybe BoK2) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee on Sept 28-30th. There would probably be no special travel funds for this, so people would have to take it out of their travel, although it might qualify as the annual meeting with NSF.

Peter noted that Line Pouchard (from the Computer and Computational Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) is leading the NSF DataOne (https://public-web.dataone.org/) project's "Data Integration and Semantics Working Group (IS-WG)". It may be an opportunity to meet with Line and discuss possibilities of common interest, if Nancy (or
anyone else from here) is going to be there at ORNL in September. Peter (who is a member of the DataOne IS-WG) told us that their group, and the DataOne Core Cyberinfrastructure Team (CCIT) will be meeting face-to-face in Santa Barbara during the week of July 18. He can help

bring this up with Line Pouchard, if Nancy wants him to. Nancy signed up for Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) which will be held at the Kellogg Conference Hotel at Gallaudet (Nov 29-30).  She is talking about the INTEROP Project.
However, she heard back from the Program committee that in addition to a talk they want a 50 minute CoP session at the end of the day. This might be of interest to several of us, who are local. However, there is only 1 free pass. A 2nd one day pass costs $495.  If 3 or more of on the team were to attend there would apparently be a 1 day registration fee of $695. Note, Early Bird rate expires November 9.

Todd had recently presented at Semtech West and provided some summary of size and trend of the workshop this year. One thing that people spoke about was Laura Campbell (director of strategic initiatives at Library of Congress) who provided the closing keynote address. It was entitled Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress.

Dan McCreary noted (and posted about) three trends at the conference:

1.	the increased role of native XML databases used in combination with RDF data stores. 
2.	the many natural-language processing tools and vendors at the conference. 
3.	the role of semantic annotations and standards directly in web content.

There was also talk of Federating crushing data warehousing as people do integration dynamically. Some links to announcements from the conference are at http://semanticweb.com/announcements-from-the-semtech-show-floor_b20608#more-20608

3. Follow Up to GeoVoCampDC 
Gary and Todd provided an update on the June Vocamp workshop at the Library of Congress which was generally a success. Thus was a good first step and provides ideas and lessons towards the next workshop. 

There were about 40 attendees the first day and 20 the 2nd. An update and notes are on the Vocamp Wiki: http://vocamp.org/wiki/GeoVoCampDC2011. This includes links to copies of most presentations as well as notes on several of the breakout sessions.

Ola could not attend but was able to present remotely on Land Use and Cover. Nancy thought this a good area to work on this further as a use cases since land cover has many issues that are already developed. Gary will contact Ola about this and see if they can develop the ontology ideas further over the summer. 

Gary participated in the typography WG lead by Gaurav Sinha which included:
•	Gary-Berg Cross 
•	Gaurav Sinha 
•	Ryan Kohl 
•	Tri Datta 
•	David Mattli 
•	And (Briefly) Dalia

The group developed an action plan to move forward working on the domain of water bodies and use the Hudson River in New York as a use-case inspiration as something to model.

The GeoSPARQL and RDF, Geometry Breakout Group has added some notes (e.g. leveraging VOID) to the VoCamp wiki. Jano provided notes on several things and his approach to ODPs might be leveraged and organized as part of a Guide towards Best Practices. This is certainly something that might advance as part of our educational component.

Todd presented the idea of Geosparql as a geobase or core from which we might extend to surrounding models. Gary is interested in an initial build-out plan for developing some of the geo-areas from the GeoSparql core.  This could use Todd 4 areas that we would hope to associate with the GeoSparql core:

•	spatial geometry, 
•	spatial relations, 
•	feature types and 
•	events.  

There is quite a bit of work on the first 2 items but the last 2 might be the most difficult to scope.  Gary suggested that we could get some advice from different use cases on feature and event requirements as part of a base. He has talked to people at NIST’s Disaster and Failure Studies Program about helping with a Use Case since they expressed an interest in a geo core ontology(s) for their work.

4. Other Discussions

Portal There was a brief discussion of developing a Portal front end
to the current SOCoP collaborative work environment (CWE)
infrastructure provided by CIM3/Ontolog. Currently these resources (e.g. REU students) are not yet available, so we will have a joint teleconference when they are ready.

Controlled Language for Knowledge Capture. Gary is looking into using a controlled language like Rabbit to capture spatial knowledge. This work has been started at Ordinance Survey by Glen Hart and others and currently there is work at Leeds University by Dr. Vania Dimitrova in the School of Computing on a tool called ROO to turn such vocabularies into OWL. Gary plans on downloading the tool over the summer and the Leeds folks promised to provide tutorial materials for the latest version due later in July:

“We will be happy to prepare these for you. We will need few weeks. We will come back to you at the beginning of July, and hope this will be convenient.” 
                                                      Vania
 
IAOA SIG for Geospatial. IAOA SIG for Geospatial. IAOA is contemplating a geoOntology SIG. John Bateman & Werner Kuhn are working on getting that off the ground. Peter suggested that we should tell them of our interest and help take
a leadership role in that SIG. Gary is now an IAOA member and Nancy may rejoin for posting on the SIG. One possible topic might be work on the 4 areas extending around the GeoSparql core previously discussed.

Workshop Announcement
Krzysztof Janowicz is one of the organizers for the Workshop on Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS 2011 held in conjunction with the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'11) at Belfast, Maine, USA, September 12-16th 2011.

See http://psumobile.org/?q=content/workshop-cognitive-engineering-mobile-gis-2011

The next meeting is targeted for July 20, 2011.