Re: [foaf-dev] [Fwd: Eduserv Research Grants Call 2008]

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 18:59 +0000, Dan Brickley wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, but can EU (eg. IST) research funding support 
> African projects? (eg. with European partners too).
> 

I am not sure either, I suppose that it would depend on the funder?

> Talking of cool projects, and getting offtopic for this thread, I see 
> you have some PHP/PostGIS work,
> http://gforge2.uwc.ac.za/projects/postgis/ ... I was wondering if you or 
> others had ever looked into possibility of integrating this with SPARQL 
> for querying. 

Sounds tempting...

> I asked Richard Cyganiak about this recently, eg. idea of 
> taking D2RQ, and improving it to have knowledge of POSTGIS SQL 
> extensions. D2RQ can rewrite SPARQL queries into SQL, so I was wondering 
> if things like http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ontology/ and 
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-20071023/
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/ ... could 
> benefit from this as an implementation technique? Any thoughts? Am just 
> thinking out of loud here. 

Well, it so happens that the other day I was thinking about exactly
this, so I sat down and wrote a GeoRSS module for the Chisimba Framework
http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/avoir/index.php?module=cms&action=viewsection&id=gen12Srv48Nme23_82
 (which I wrote a FOAF module as well as the start of a Semantic Campus
add-on for as well). The next step I thought would be to munge the
geoRSS generated points, polygons and linestrings into meaningful FOAF
triples as well all for context.

This is certainly an avenue that I would like to explore further, as
soon as I have some time that is (I only get to hack around with
geography and SW in my spare time unfortunately).

It would be great to get in touch with some others that may be
interested and see what we can come up with.

Thanks for the links, that looks like a pretty decent starting point at
least!

--Paul

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