Minutes from Wednesday’s SOCoP Meeting Sept. 21, 2011 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT

Attendees-Participants: Gary Berg-Cross (Knowledge Strategies), Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin), Peter Yim (CIM3), Mike Dean and Dave Kolas (BBN), James Wilson (JMU), and Krzysztof Janowicz (UCSB) who phoned in for the last 20 minutes

The following topics were discussed.

1. The status of the Nov. SSO workshop
The first round of reviews is complete for the Nov. Spatial Semantics and Ontology (SSO) Workshop (at ACM SIGSPatial). We accepted 6 well groomed papers included a 10 page paper from Marcus on Moving Objects.  Three others were asked for a revision which we will give another review. 
Nancy assumes that the workshop is from 9-5 but will check.

Werner Kuhn is tentatively or keynote. Nancy will finalize discussion with him. We still need to decide on an overall schedule and figure out the time frame. Nancy will check with Markus on start and stop time.

Gary proposed a 45- 60’ Panel for the Workshop on the topic of "Progress and Challenges in Using Geo-Ontologies for Data Sharing and Reuse."
If we can it fit it in we might have 3 panelists (Jano and Werner as a start, Mark Gahegan will probably not be coming to present, but was a candidate) and a discussant.

2. Update on the Terra Cognita workshop
Foundations, Technologies and Applications of the Geospatial Web, in conjunction with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011). It is being held October 23-24, 2011, Bonn, Germany:
Workshop website: http://asio.bbn.com/terracognita2011/
ISWC website: http://iswc2011.semanticweb.org/

Dave reported that they got on 19 submissions. They were a good set and accept 12 papers. Because of the number of papers there will be no key note speaker, but they might possibly have a lightening round. The agenda is up on site.

3. Plans for CyberGIS meeting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL Knoxville,TN) from Sept 28-30th.  
You can see a link to the meeting at http://cybergis.cigi.uiuc.edu/node/36

We still need to decide who will speak, since our 30 minute slot was listed as:
“Plenary Address: Semantics and Ontologies in the Geospatial Realm”

One idea is to have 3 speakers: Nancy, Dave and Mike in that order.
If we did this Nancy would have to cover some of the material Gary developed on ontologies.  He will send her a revision and a discussion of the intent of the slides along with a suggested overall outline of the presentation.

The breakdown might be:
Nancy 12 minutes Overall Vision,Project Intro and Ontology Basics
Dave 10 minutes GeoSPARQL example
Mike  5 minutes on OOR
3 minute Remainder for Q& A.

We learned that all meetings will be at ORNL.  We did also hear that there will be a shuttle from the hotel to ORNL so people may be able to get by without a rental car, although ride sharing is an option. Most people are arriving for the Wed tutorials, but Dave and Gary will arrive Wed evening. The logistics for a group meeting Wed night still need to be worked out, but dinner near the Doubletree hotel might be an option.

Friday is a day for our project planning and probably in the afternoon we can talk to them about collaboration.  Sometime in there we might meet with Line Pouchard (from the ORNL Computer and Computational Directorate) while we are at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  

Line is involved with the NSF DataOne project (https://public-web.dataone.org/) and the Earth Science Semantics Portal (ESSP) (http://www.bioontology.org/earth-sciences-semantics-portal ). Nancy and/or Gary will try to contact her to firm up a meeting.

4. Fall Workshop at USGS 
Gary and John had discussed a Fall workshop at USGS.  Dalia and Lynn were enthusiastic about this and have reserved space at USGS Reston for the Monday of Nov 28 before SemTechEast or after it on Friday Dec 2. This might be an opportunity to show some of our accomplishments with the OOR and a demo. Gary had discussed the possibility with Jano who indicated that he might come or would certainly present remotely.  Gary is checking with others at PSU who might be interested in coming and after the presentation at ORNL will try to develop the plan more fully. 

5. Update on OOR and Candidate Ontologies

Mike perusing 2 paths – one is to host the VMware image at BBN (Mike has been running it locally )or have a temporary host with the support of Ken Baclawski at North Eastern. Either would allow Mike do a live demo and allow people to browse the content. We would also make the name on the temp host SOCoP.OOR.NET. Later we can turn this back to a sandbox name when back at CIM3 where it will have the alias of SOCoP.OOR.NET.

Gary will have to load the 8 ontologies again, but in the new version there will be visualization (and mapping, which would take more learning to use). Gary had developed a notional slide showing some relations of these ontologies.
Mike will try to find the zip file of ontologies from the Trade Study and load these also.

Gary discussed the status of a call for people to submit ontologies to the OOR. Gary formally presented the call to the GeoSemantic WG at the OGC meeting in Boulder CO. There was general interest with one question being the degree of federation possible between this OOR and the BioPortal which some use.

6. NSF Grant Details
There was an update about hours and period of performance. One questions was could we extend year 1 beyond Aug 31.  Nancy thought the funds would roll over and be used in that way.  Any saved hours could be used later. Nancy will check on this as well as whether Peter Yim needs to submit something for Year 2.

7. Other Topics of Interest
James found a call for an Geospatial Ontology Session at AAG 2012. The call reads in part:

“The capture, representation, and manipulation of knowledge is a great challenge from both theoretical and practical perspectives. With advances in knowledge engineering it becomes possible to employ ontologies in a number of traditional and novel geoprocessing  applications such as intelligent search, integration of disparate geodata, standardization efforts, knowledge discovery and information extraction from unstructured sources. The purpose of this session is to bring together researchers working in various fields of geospatial ontology.”  

This is sponsored by the Cyberinfrastructure (CI) and Cartography Specialty Group. The Session Chair is Liping Di (GMU) and the Session Organizer is Alexandre Sorokine (ORNL). Session Co-organizers are Rob Raskin (NASA) and Chen-Chieh Feng (NUS). Abstracts are due September 26th.

The next SOCoP meeting is targeted for Oct. 19, 2011.