5th International Terra Cognita Workshop 2012
In Conjunction with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference
November 12, 2012
Boston, USA

Foundations, Technologies and Applications of the Geospatial Web


Objectives

The wide availability of technologies such as GPS, map services and social networks, has resulted in the proliferation of geospatial data on the Web. In addition to material produced by professionals (e.g., maps), the public has also been encouraged to make geospatial content, including their geographical location and a record of their outdoor activities, available online. The volume of such user-generated geospatial content is constantly growing. Similarly, the amount of data extracted from the Web and published as Linked Open Data is increasing. Linked Open Data include many data sets with geospatial properties such as coordinates, feature classes or topological relations. Examples of such data sets are GeoNames.org, LinkedGeoData.org and DBpedia.org.

The geo-referencing of Web resources and users has given rise to various services and applications that exploit it. With the location of users being made available widely, new issues such as those pertaining to security and privacy arise. Likewise, emergency response, context sensitive user applications, and complex GIS tasks all lend themselves toward solutions that combine both the Geospatial Web and the Semantic Web.

Researchers have been quick to realize the importance of these developments and have started working on the relevant research problems, giving rise to new topical research areas such as Geographic Information Retrieval, Linked Geospatial Data, GeoWeb 2.0. Similarly, standardization bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have been developing relevant standards such as the Geography Markup Language (GML) and GeoSPARQL.

The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, as well as interested parties from industry and government, to advance the frontiers of this exciting research area. Bringing together Semantic Web and geospatial researchers helps encourage the use of semantics in geospatial applications and the use of spatial elements in semantic research and applications. The field continues to gain popularity, resulting in a need for a forum to discuss relevant issues.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Data models and languages for the Geospatial Web
  • Systems and architectures for the Geospatial Web
  • Geographic Information Retrieval
  • Linked Geospatial Data
  • Ontologies and rules in the Geospatial Web
  • Uncertainty in the Geospatial Web
  • User interface technologies for the Geospatial Web
  • Geospatial Web and mobile data management
  • Security and privacy issues in the Geospatial Web
  • Geospatial Web applications
  • User-generated geospatial content
  • OGC and W3C technologies and standards in the Geospatial Web

Program

Time Kind of Presentation Authors / Presenter Affiliation Title PDF/PPT
09:00-09:50 Invited talk Matthew Perry Oracle The GeoSPARQL OGC standard pdf
09:50-10:10 Invited demo Dave Kolas BBN Technologies GeoSPARQL in Parliament ppt
10:10-10:30 Invited Demo Kostis Kyzirakos Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens The Strabon Implementation of GeoSPARQL

10:30-11:00 break
11:00-12:30 Paper presentation Ghislain Auguste Atemezing and Raphael Troncy EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France Comparing Vocabularies for Representing Geographical Features and Their Geometry pdf pdf
Paper presentation Charalampos Nikolaou and Manolis Koubarakis Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Querying Linked Geospatial Data with Incomplete Information pdf pdf
Paper presentation Marek Smid and Zdenek Kouba Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague OnGIS: Ontology Driven Geospatial Search and Integration pdf pdf
12:30-14:00 lunch
14:00-15:00 Invited talk Ralf Moeller Hamburg University of Technology Perfect Rewriting for Ontology Based Query Answering over Spatial Databases pdf
15:00-15:30 Paper presentation Jesper Zedlitz and Norbert Luttenberger German National Library for Economics and CAU Kiel Transforming Between UML Conceptual Models And OWL 2 Ontologies pdf
15:30-16:00 break
16:00-17:30 Paper presentation Alkyoni Baglatzi, Margarita Kokla and Marinos Kavouras National Technical University of Athens Semantifying OpenStreetMap pdf
Paper presentation Mihai Codescu, Daniel Couto Vale, Oliver Kutz and Till Mossakowski DFKI GmbH Bremen and SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Bremen, Germany Ontology-based Route Planning for OpenStreetMap pdf
Invited presentation Raj Singh Open Geospatial Consortium Framing a Geo Strategy for the Web with Points-Of-Interest Data ppt
18:00 closing

Workshop Proceedings

The workshop proceedings can be downloaded as a single pdf from here.
The workshop proceedings are also published in the CEUR series.

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee

Alia Abdelmoty, Cardiff University, UK
Thomas Barkowsky, University of Bremen, Germany
Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois, Chicago
Mike Dean, BBN Technologies, USA
John Goodwin, Ordnance Survey, UK
Glen Hart, Ordnance Survey, UK
Krzysztof Janowicz, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Marinos Kavouras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Stefan Manegold, CWI, The Netherlands
Alexandros Ntoulas, Microsoft Research
Dieter Pfoser, Athena-Research and Innovation Center, Greece
Florian Probst, SAP Research, Germany
Ross Purves, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Özguer L. Özcep, Hamburg University of Technology, Germany
Thorsten Reitz, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Germany
Timos Sellis, Athena-Research and Innovation Center and National Technical University of Athens,Greece.
Spiros Skiadopoulos, University of the Peloponnese, Greece
Stavros Vassos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Nancy Wiegand, University of Wisconsin, USA
James Wilson, James Madison University, USA
Stefan Wölfl, University of Freiburg, Germany

Workshop Series

This is the 5th Terra Cognita workshop. The previous ones were:

Organization/Sponsorship

This workshop is organized by members of the Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP) and European project TELEIOS.

TELEIOS is an FP7/ICT project with the goal of building an Earth Observatory. TELEIOS concentrates heavily on geospatial data (satellite images, traditional GIS data, geospatial Web data).

SOCoP is a geospatial semantics interest group currently mainly with members from U.S. federal agencies, academia, and business. SOCoP’s goal is to foster collaboration among users, technologists, and researchers of spatial knowledge representations and reasoning towards the development of a set of core, common geospatial ontologies for use by all in the Semantic Web.