MExLab Opening

ifgi’s initiative GI@School since 5 years transfers knowledge and science from the labs, especially MUSIL into schools. A broad program has been developed and workshops from 2h to 2 weeks have been performed on several topics around GI Science. 

Now GI@School receives a new „home“: MExLab ExperiMINTe  - MExLab stands for Münsters Experiment Lab, MINT is the german translation of the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Mathematics) – is the University’s place to host high school students in scientific workshops. The new colorful building consists of two seminar rooms and is fully equipped with laptops, interactive boards, android smartphones, GPS receivers and a lot of different sensors to work with. GI@School is a founding member of MExLab ExperiMINTe and will organize its workshops in the new building. Some examplary workshop topics are „Use and Integration of Mobile Sensors“, „GEO-App Development“ or „Sensor-Web Weather Station“. See also the university’s press release about the opening (in German).

One idea is to provide a real MUSIL-Workshop for GI@School and perform it in the easter holidays – a GI Science academy is planned from April 10 – 14 with daily workshops.  I am sure linked data or some of our philiosophical topics would be great to work on with high school students. Please comment with ideas!

- Thomas Bartoschek

Posted Monday, December 19th, at 4:15 PM (∞). This post has comments.

MSc Thesis Topic: Triplified Spatial and Temporal Relations

The research question of this MSc thesis topic is: “how can we describe and relate  spatio-temporal resources using RDF triples, and publish them as Linked Data?”

The student will explore the existing work, and evaluate different ways for addressing the research question in a case study. The result should include a set of reusable ontology design patterns.

Interested students should contact Tomi Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de).

Posted Friday, November 18th, at 11:35 AM (∞). This post has comments.

MSc Thesis Topic: a Vocabulary for Science

The task of this MSc thesis is to create a vocabulary for describing and relating  the impressing amount of scientific resources: research settings, data, project reports, publications, people, projects to name a few. Relations having spatial or temporal nature, or relations that are weighted are given a high priority in the thesis work. 

As a material the student will get results of experiments and discussions about essential concepts in science. Student will build the work as an extension/modification of the Linked Science Core Vocabulary

Interested students should contact Tomi Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de).

Posted Friday, November 18th, at 11:25 AM (∞). This post has comments.

BSc Thesis Topic: ArgooMap Mobile

ArgooMap is a map-based discussion forum that has been developed at ifgi for several years in cooperation with our colleagues in Toronto, Canada. The different versions of the tool have been tested in various public participation processes. However, the tool has always been restricted to home-use, which is especially undesirable for use cases where citizens are supposed to provide input for improvements in the city: Ideas for improvement at a certain intersection, such as “clearly mark the crosswalk”, usually come up while the people are on site. The idea of this thesis is therefore to port the ArgooMap code to smartphones, preferably as a platform-independent web app.

Interested students should contact Carsten Keßler.

Posted Wednesday, September 28th, at 4:27 PM (∞). This post has comments.

Linked Science: Linked Science Core vocabulary online

linkedscience:

The Linked Science Core vocabulary is designed for describing a research setting and to interconnect it to other related things and components (researcher, data, hypothesis, etc.).

You may check LSC online at http://linkedscience.org/lsc/ns/. There will be a breakout session at the

Found via linkedscience. Posted Wednesday, August 31st, at 5:12 PM (∞). This post has comments.

BSc Thesis Topic: Linked Data for Environmental Monitoring

Efficient environmental monitoring is crucial in order to reduce damages when a natural disaster (e.g. earthquake, flooding, forest fire) occur. To achieve this efficiency environmental organizations need to access multidisciplinary, spatiotemporal data and analyze it for rapid response. Linked Data is an approach to connect, publish and retrieve such data using the Web technologies.

The student will carry on a study on the useful vocabularies for environmental monitoring, and extend them to be used for improving the spatio-temporal linkage of environmental events of interest. The student will also use the developed vocabularies to describe and visualize environmental data.

Interested students should contact Dr. Kauppinen (tomi.kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de) or Dr. Díaz (laura.diaz [at] uji.es).

Posted Thursday, July 28th, at 2:58 PM (∞). This post has comments.

Linked Science @ ISWC 2011

The 1st International Workshop on Linked Science 2011 (LISC 2011) will be collocated with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2011) in Bonn, Germany in October, 2011! 

In the LISC 2011 we will discuss and present results of new ways of publishing, sharing, linking, and analyzing scientific resources motivated by driving scientific requirements, as well as reasoning over the data to discover interesting new links  and scientific insights.

Check for more information and the call for papers @ http://linkedscience.org/events/lisc2011 .

Posted Wednesday, May 25th, at 4:46 PM (∞). This post has comments.

LODUM: Quick and dirty RDF development: Enter RDFpad

lodum-ms:

In a recent chat with Tomi and Johannes, we discussed the idea of using etherpad for RDF development. Since we use etherpad for pretty much everything that concerns collaborative writing, why not use it for some quick and dirty RDF development? The results would be immediately online,…

Found via lodum-ms. Posted Wednesday, May 18th, at 2:09 PM (∞). This post has comments.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS @ COSIT 2011

Workshop on Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS 2011
In conjunction with the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT’11)

Belfast, Maine, USA, September 12-16th 2011.

*Workshop Description & Scope*

While mobile computing and Location-Based Services (LBS) have been 
around for more than a decade, it is just now that the availability of 
open source APIs and GPS-enabled smartphones make them accessible to a 
broader public. Citizens as sensors, location-based social networks, and 
lifelogs offer new, highly heterogeneous and timely sources of data that 
require processing and integration to develop mobile recommender and 
decision support systems on top of them. In contrast to desktop 
applications, mobile services are highly affected by contextual 
information such as the weather, they have reduced user interfaces, and 
require additional inference to extract user profiles and tasks from 
implicit information such as local time and location. The combination of 
these factors makes cognitive engineering methods to user interfaces and 
recommender services a promising approach. Such methods integrate 
cognitive and computer science approaches to the design and construction 
of machines. More specifically, when applying cognitive engineering to 
Mobile GIS, principles of human spatial cognition regarding the 
representation and processing of spatial and temporal aspects of 
phenomena, and aspects of mobile decision-making must be considered.

*List of Relevant Topics*

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

Cognitive Engineering for a dynamic world
Cognitive aspects of mobile computing
Evaluation of cognitive engineering approaches
Location-based decision support systems
Mobile aspects of human decision-making
Spatial learning in a mobile context
Mobile Human-Computer-Interaction
Citizens as sensors
Volunteered Geographic Information for mobile devices
Communication of geographic information
Trust and provenance in mobile geographic information
Representing and reasoning about context
Semantic similarity and analogy
Ontology personalization
Semantics of geographic information
Mobile Semantic Web
Personal mobile GIS
Mobile sensor systems
Location-based services
Geovisualization for mobile devices

*Workshop Format and Structure*

The workshop will focus on intensive discussions setting a road-map for 
research on cognitive engineering for Mobile GIS. To prepare the 
discussion and share thoughts with the research community, participants 
are requested to submit short vision statements between 4-6 pages in 
length. These statements of interest will be used by the program 
committee to select relevant topics for breakout groups. The vision 
statements will be presented as lightning talks of not more than 5 
minutes to inspire discussion and coordinate the breakout groups. The 
groups will report on their outcomes, identified research topics, and 
how they relate to each other. We especially welcome demonstrations and 
will have a session for their presentation. The workshop organizers will 
take notes and collect feedback during the discussions and prepare a 
draft version of a poster that outlines the research agenda. This poster 
will be discussed in a final session and published online.

*Submissions and Proceedings*

All presented papers will be made available through the workshop 
web-page and published as a volume at CEUR-WS online proceedings. 
Submissions have to be formatted according to Springer’s Lecture Notes 
in Computer Science style. While the workshop will focus on discussion 
of upcoming research, extended versions of workshop papers will be 
considered for a fast-track submission to a journal open-call special 
issue on Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS targeted for the first 
quarter of 2012.

*Important Dates*

Submission due: 31. May 2011
Acceptance Notification: 20. June 2011
Camera-ready Copies: 30. June 2011

*Organizers*

Krzysztof Janowicz, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Martin Raubal, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Antonio Krüger, Saarland University, Germany
Carsten Keßler, University of Muenster, Germany

*Programme Committee*

Benjamin Adams, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Drew Dara-Abrams, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Boyan Brodaric, Geological Survey of Canada, Canada
Michael Compton, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia
Matt Duckham, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Andrew Frank, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Brent Hecht, Northwestern University, USA
Stephen Hirtle, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Christian Kray, University of Muenster, Germany
Daniel R. Montello, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Silvia Nittel, University of Maine, USA
Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto University and University of
Helsinki, Finland
Tumasch Reichenbacher, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Kai-Florian Richter, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Michael Rohs, University of Munich, Germany
Johannes Schoening, Saarland University, Germany
Matthew Turk, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Posted Friday, May 13th, at 3:31 PM (∞). This post has comments.

PhD Thesis Defense „Trust and Reputation Models for Human Sensor Observations”

Mohamed will defend his PhD thesis this Friday at 8:30 AM (!) in the ifgi 2.0 seminar room. Good luck!

Posted Wednesday, May 11th, at 3:32 PM (∞). This post has comments.