Conference

Dec 3, 2010 at USGS Reston, VA

The Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP) is hosting a workshop on spatial semantics and ontologies at the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Center
12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA 20192 on Friday December 3, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM. This workshop is organized by SOCoP with support from the USGS, Ontolog, and others.

The purpose of the workshop is to continue the discussion from the previous SOCoP workshops in advancing spatial ontologies and semantic tools in the geospatial data domain. The main theme of this 3rd iteration of the workshop is the current and future state of development, implementation, and use of geospatial semantics and ontologies in meeting organizational mission and program needs.

In addressing this theme, as at last year’s workshop, we anticipate having a morning of talks and an afternoon of small group roundtable discussions. Expected this year will be presentations on GeoSPARQL, a geo SameAs Demonstration, Open Geospatial Consortium GeoSemantics, USGS Ontology for The National Map, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency activities. In addition there will be a discussion about a National Science Foundation INTEROP Project which was recently awarded to several Spatial Ontology Community of Practice members. This Project: “an Interdisciplinary Network to Support Geospatial Data Sharing, Integration, and Interoperability” promises to be an exciting opportunity in developing and using ontologies, software tools, and collaboration methods to support geospatial data sharing, integration, and interoperation.

There is no charge for the workshop and more information about SOCoP and the workshop will available at www.socop.org as it is developed. Even though there will be no charge for the Workshop, we will ask attendees to register with SOCoP to facilitate logistics and entry into the USGS Building. Any questions regarding the 3rd Annual SOCoP Workshop can be addressed to Dr. Gary Berg-Cross via email: gbergcross [at] gmail.com.      

A final program, meeting location directions and registration information should be available soon.

Proceedings from last year’s Workshop complete with presentation slides and audio are available at http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SOCoP/Workshop_2009_11_12, thanks to the support of Ontolog.

The EGU General Assembly 2011 in Vienna, Austria will bring together geoscientists from all over the world into one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. The EGU provides for scientists a forum to present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geosciences. Technical sessions of interest to OGC members include:

1. Real Use of Standards and Technologies (RUST)Conveners: John van de Vegte (KNMI), David Arctur (OGC)ESSI-RUST is a session where standards and technologies meet end users bydemonstrating leading-edge and ready-to-use services and applications.Focus will be on (but not exclusively) OGC based services, datainterchange encodings (GML, netCDF, HDF), CF-conventions and their use inapplications and services. Future challenges in RUST shall also beaddressed.

2. Information Fusion: Issues, Barriers and ApproachesConveners: David Arctur (OGC), Peter Fox (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)Merging disparate data sources and models for multidisciplinary study isan increasingly urgent need.  Key drivers for this direction of researchinclude requirements for improved situational awareness; the vital needfor enhanced preparedness and swift, appropriate response to natural andmanmade disasters; global climate change; and a wide range of othersocietal and environmental circumstances. Technology - including standards- for meeting these ends has advanced rapidly, but cultural,institutional, and related issues can impede our ability to apply it. Wewelcome submissions that describe successful integrative data analyses,with descriptions of specific solutions for overcoming barriers andobtaining cooperation and coordination in multidisciplinary settings.

3. Climate Information IntegrationConveners: David Arctur (OGC), Stefano Nativi (Univ Florence, CNR), SandroFiore (CMCC, Center for Euro-Mediterranean Climate Change)The current climate debate highlights the importance of free, open,authoritative sources of quality climate data that are available for peerreview and for collaborative purposes. It is increasingly important toallow disparate organizations around the world to share climate data in anopen manner, and to perform dynamic processing of climate data via webbased services, using common “community agreed” standards without havingto change their internal systems or the language that they use internallyto describe their data. We also wish to identify archives of qualityclimate data, and make these available for interdisciplinary work. Focuswill be on applications and opportunities for enhancing existing dataexchange standards for use with climate data.