Geoinformatics Workshop and Neogeo

Hi,

I will not be able to join a telecon today, but will plan one for  
next Monday and hope that some people can join me on the IRC channel  
from time to time between now and then.

Just returned from the European Geoinformatics Workshop put on by the  
E-Science Center in Edinburgh, which was an interesting conjunction  
of geo as in geosciences, geo as in geography, and geo as in  
geosemantics. I will post further thoughts and information on the  
Geospatial XG web pages, but here are some initial observations:

The workshop participants made clear that there are complexities and  
subtleties in how we observe and model the Earth which are still  
fairly far beyond the state of formal semantics work. There are,  
however, opportunities to expand the way such work is done,  
particularly involving the Web, which have simpler if not more subtle  
requirements. Well defined paths from Web representations to more  
private ones which do not violate the more sophisticated  
representations are critical to this.

Other angles which the workshop looked at were the social aspects of  
scientific networking, and the large-scale aspects of scientific  
networks, e.g. grids. There is clearly a need to add not only  
geosemantics and content semantics into semantic Web service work,  
but also management, topology, transactional protocol, security and  
rights. Almost any progress there would be significant, e.g. the  
spatial ontology areas already jotted down for the Geo XG.

More on this later. In the meantime, we are desperately in need of  
review, comment, and refinement for the neogeo vocabulary. Please  
help out.

Cheers,

Josh Lieberman

Geospatial XG Coordinator
mailto:jlieberman@traversetechnologies.com
tel +1 (617) 395-7766
fax: +1 (815) 717-981