February 2012
1 post
14 tags
Workshop on GIScience in the Big Data Age 2012
Workshop on GIScience in the Big Data Age 2012 (GIBDA2012) will be organized in conjunction with the seventh International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2012 (GIScience 2012) in Columbus, Ohio, USA on September 18th, 2012.
Workshop Description and Scope
The rapidly increasing information universe with new data created at a speed surpassing our capacities to store it, calls for...
January 2012
1 post
Big Data in Geographic Information Science Panel... →
In conjunction with the Geographic Vocabularies Camp Santa Barbara 2012 (GeoVoCampSB2012).
Presented by the Reginald Golledge Distinguished Lectureship in Geography and spatial@UCSB.
University of California, Santa Barbara, 3rd February 2012, 4:30pm-6:00, 1930 Buchanan Hall.
Description
The rapidly increasing information universe with new data created at a speed surpassing our capacities to...
December 2011
1 post
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...
November 2011
2 posts
MSc Thesis Topic: Triplified Spatial and Temporal...
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...
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...
September 2011
1 post
1 tag
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...
August 2011
1 post
Linked Science: Linked Science Core vocabulary... →
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 …
July 2011
1 post
9 tags
BSc Thesis Topic: Linked Data for Environmental...
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...
May 2011
4 posts
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...
LODUM: Quick and dirty RDF development: Enter... →
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,…
5 tags
Call for Papers: Workshop on Cognitive Engineering...
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...
PhD Thesis Defense „Trust and Reputation Models...
Mohamed will defend his PhD thesis this Friday at 8:30 AM (!) in the ifgi 2.0 seminar room. Good luck!
April 2011
3 posts
Master's thesis topic: Linked Open Data Package...
Task: Create a package for the R Project that enables retrieving, analyzing and publishing of Linked Data within R.
The student uses a research and review scenario in the context of LODUM to test the approach, and reports how it goes beyond the-state-of-the-art data handling within R.
Interested students should contact Dr. Kauppinen by email: kauppinen [at] uni-muenster.de.
Call for Papers: Semantic Web Journal Special...
See: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/blog/special-issue-semantics-geochange
Description Geochange refers to changes in the environment resulting from human and natural factors. These often large-scale changes range from land cover changes such as desertification, land degradation and deforestation to extreme events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Moreover, changes have...
LUCERO @ LODUM
lodum-ms:
In today’s MUSIL brown bag meeting, Mathieu d’Aquin, project director of the LUCERO project at The Open University (OU), UK, will present their ongoing efforts to publish OU data as Linked Data. Following a visit of LODUM staff to OU in December 2010, Mathieu will present the current state of data.open.ac.uk to the MUSIL group.
The talk will start at 12:15 in the seminar room, 3rd...
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
BSc Thesis Topic: Generating Linked Open Data from...
The task for this thesis is to create Linked Open Data from historic parcel titles for the city of York, UK. These titles describe land ownership in the city of York. They are available as digital text documents. Place names, person names and spatial relations need to be extracted in order to annotate these documents with semantic descriptions to make them available for further reasoning, e.g....
February 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Call for Scholarship Applications
Deadline: April 30, 2011 With the support of the North-Rhine-Westphalian Ministry for Innovation, Science and Research (MIWF), the Institute for Geoinformatics provides three scholarships for nationals of selected emerging and developing countries, see http://www.bmz.de/de/ministerium/zahlen_fakten/DAC-Laenderliste_Berichtsjahre_2009-2010.pdf, and with limited financial resources (during the...
Call for papers: Semantic Web Journal special...
See: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/blog/special-issue-linked-data-science-and-education
The number of universities, research organizations, publishers and funding agencies contributing to the Linked Data cloud is constantly increasing. The Linked Data paradigm has been identified as a lightweight approach for data dissemination and integration, opening up new opportunities for the...
January 2011
1 post
1 tag
Master's thesis: Identification of Water Bodies
Task: Write a mobile phone app that identifies water bodies (rivers and lakes) in pictures taken from planes. Use vector data from Open Street Map to test which theory of shape produces the best results, independent of orientation and (if possible) scale.
Interested Students should contact Prof. Kuhn.
December 2010
1 post
2 tags
Master's/Diploma thesis: Linked Spatiotemporal...
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is monitored by various systems. However, the problem is that the datasets these systems produce are not fully and explicitly linked. Without links reasoning about the data is hard. Linked Data is an approach to connect and openly publish related data.
In the Masters/diploma thesis the student will develop and evaluate methods and tools for creating...
November 2010
3 posts
Quality of Volunteered Geographic Information
Masters / diploma thesis topic:
One of the major challenges of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is information quality. This problem is more pressing when trying to integrate humans as sensors into the sensor web. This thesis work will develop a simulation of a computational spatio-temporal model of trust and reputation as a quality assessment measure of VGI in the sensor web. Within...
Master/Diploma thesis: Signposting algorithm for...
In a road network graph with edges labeled by road classes, determine the ordered lists of major destinations optimally reachable from each node in the direction of each outgoing edge. Think about how optimality and goal importance can be parameterized. Validate and calibrate your algorithm with actual lists of destinations at road intersection signage.
Contact: Simon Scheider
Proximity
In today’s brown bag, we discussed fundamental concept #2: proximity. After thediscussion about location last week, it turned out that both have a few things in common.
First of all, both are relations. One can only be located relative to some object, and one can only be near to something. Proximity, however, is even more relative, as it depends on the current observer and context. A place...
October 2010
3 posts
"Location" discussed today in the Musil Brown Bag...
It is about location!
We decided to discuss foundational concepts during the next ten MUSIL Brown Bag meeting. Today we started with location. Thinking about location raised interesting questions like what is a location, what kind of things (objects yes, but what about events?) can be located at somewhere, where they can locate at, and with what kind of relationships they can be bound to that...
MUSIL Retreat 2010: Linked Data for Science
1 Background and Motivation
During three days in September 2010, the Münster Semantic Interoperability Lab held its annual research retreat in the Swiss Alps on the topic of Linked Data for Science. The retreat group consisted of 12 MUSIL members and two external guests – Prof. Dr. Femke Reitsma from University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and Prof. Dr. Martin Raubal from University of...
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Master-/Diplomarbeit: Entwurf einer...
September 2010
2 posts
1 tag
BSc thesis: Adjusting the resolution of location...
Wikipedia pages on places often come with location information, given as coordinates in the top right corner of the page. However, this information is often overly precise, as shown in the example of Berlin given above. The task for this thesis is to develop a bot that automatically lowers the precision of the location information to an appropriate level, depending on the size of the place...
Linked Open Data (LOD) and Science
MUSIL just came back from an inspiring workshop on how to enable science through linked open data. More on this in a separate post later.
A different question, raised by the Linked Spatio-Temporal Data workshop at GIScience today, is what science questions are raised by LOD. It is exciting to see the many projects where something useful or promising is just done through LOD. And yet, as...
August 2010
3 posts
Master's thesis: Providing Volunteered Geographic...
This thesis project builds on a previous thesis that developed of a user interface for annotating Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) with a standardized vocabulary (the GEMET thesaurus). The goal of this research is to make these annotated chunks of VGI available as Linked Data. The topic covers several aspects such as the development of a standards-based publication scheme, identification...
2 tags
Master/Diploma thesis: Affordance-based...
Current POI tags in Open Street Map are based on place categories like “cafe” and “bar”. Such categories do not imply offered functionalities, e.g. “drinking beer”, which account for the “interest” of POIs. For example, “Kaffeehäuser” in Vienna frequently offer beer and therefore functionally overlap with bars, whereas cafes in the US do...
2 tags
PhD thesis topic
Ontology of scale: The literature on scale of geodata has not yet reached clarity on the various notions commonly subsumed under this topic (resolution or granularity, support, etc.). In the context of our work on sensor observations, PhD research shall address this conceptual confusion and produce a formal specification of notions of spatial, temporal, and thematic scale. The results shall be...
June 2010
7 posts
INSPIRE conference, Krakow
I didn’t really had much high expectations for the INSPIRE conferenc. I was proved wrong. Sure, the talks were mostly about standards and regulations (and in this sense rather hard to digest). But they were some sort of reality check as well, grounding our work at OGC and in the research projects and showing us what our work in academia can eventually result in. GMES and GEOSS are hot...
Presentation about Metadata
We were invited to give an introductory talk into metadata of geographic information at the GiN-Forum “Metadaten” (June 22nd, Jacobs University, Bremen). The slides are on German. It was quite an interesting experience, since the audience was mostly coming from the public sector. Other talks by GDI-DE (the German organization responsible for coordinating the implementation of INSPIRE)...
“This European initiative will provide Europeans with information that can be...”
– said Vice-President Antonio Tajani. GMES has been approved on June 16th by the European Parliament. This is good news for MUSIL and our research projects.
2 tags
Bachelor Thesis: Augmenting POIs in Open Street...
The task for this bachelor thesis is to develop and implement an approach to automatically augment the tags of points of interest in Open Street Maps with the links to the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Interested students should contact Carsten Keßler.
2 tags
musil @ Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010
We gave a talk at the workshop “Ontology Repositories and Editors for the Semantic Web” about our implementation of the concept repository in the Swing and GDI-Grid project. The other presentations covered, amongst others, the storage and access to the service repository developed in the Soa4All-project, the various tools provided by the Semantic Computing Research Group in Helsinki,...
Brown Bag on June 11, 2010
Reading: Sören Auer, Jens Lehmann, Sebastian Hellmann (2009) LinkedGeoData – Adding a spatial Dimension to the Web of Data, ISWC 2009:
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer/publication/linkedgeodata.pdf
Note that we will start an hour earlier than usual, i.e., at 11:15!
SeReS II project results online
In the project “semantic reference systems for geospatial information (SeReS II)” we have made considerable progress in the last months. Results include among others a JOSM plugin for Open Street Map data which allows to check and search for junctions in road network data excerpts. For more information on the underlying ideas and for downloads, go to the SeReS II website.
May 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Student Assistant Position at International...
Geo‐sensors (e.g., weather station, stream gauge, water quality sensor, etc) measure the properties of geo‐phenomena in geographic space at different points in time. Today, geosensor data are used widely by various organizations for scientific investigations and environmental forecasting and decision support systems. Access to actual sensors for developing or debugging an environmental application...
Towards Digital Earth: Search, Discover and Share...
We are organizing a workshop at Future Internet Symposium, Berlin, September 20th, 2010. Up-to-date information is available at http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/DE2010/.
Motivation and Scope
Virtual globes such as Google Earth have become popular for commercial, social and scientific applications in the past few years. The former US vice president Al Gore coined the term ‘Digital Earth’ to...
2 tags
Brown Bag on May 7, 2010
Besides the talk by Bill Duncan, we will have two (closely related) readings to discuss:
Sören Auer, Jens Lehmann, Sebastian Hellmann (2009) LinkedGeoData – Adding a spatial Dimension to the Web of Data, ISWC 2009
Kuhn, W. (2010). Modeling vs. Markup. Vision statement for the Semantic Web Journal (under review):
April 2010
2 posts
Next brown bag
The brown bag on April 23rd will contain our GIScience short paper discussions (everybody planning to submit to GIScience, please briefly present your planned submission).
Open position in the ENVISION project
Are you interested in joining MUSIL as PhD student in the European research project ENVISION? We are looking for graduates (MSc level or equivalent) with a strong background in geoinformatics or computer science.
The ENVISION (environmental services infrastructure with ontologies) project aims to support environmental modeling experts to migrate their computer models into the Web. With envision,...
March 2010
2 posts
WORKSHOP ON LINKED SPATIOTEMPORAL DATA AT...
Whilst the Web has changed with the advent of the Social Web from mostly authoritative towards increasing amounts of user generated content, it is essentially about linked documents. These documents provide structure and context for the described data and easy the interpretation. In contrast, the upcoming Data Web is about linking data. Datasets are not bound to a specific document but can be...
Semantic Annotations Proxy
we have made our most recent development, the Semantic Annotations Proxy, available as free service. Annotations link from meta-data documents to external, shared vocabularies such as ontologies or gazetteers. The proxy “injects” these references into existing source documents coming from remote Web services without the need to update existing systems. The semantic annotations proxy is ...
February 2010
1 post
ENVISION successfully started.
We are excited to announce that our new research project, ENVISION (environmental services infrastructure with ontologies) has started last month, and we are already making good progress. No wonder, is it the follow-up of the successful SWING project. We are going to focus on improving the SWING components, and will release all implemented software as a large-scale open source project within...
January 2010
1 post
A Happy New MUSIL Year to all!
MUSIL starts 2010 with a great year behind it: We have
expanded our range of research topics (going seriously into sensor semantics, broadening our research on social aspects, engaging in cultural aspects again, taking up process ontology work, advancing rapidly with grounding),
strengthened our collaborations within ifgi and worldwide,
got more publications accepted than ever before,
...
December 2009
1 post
3 MUSIL papers accepted for FOIS 2010!
At the 6th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2010), 11th-14th May 2010, MUSIL will present 3 papers:
Jens Ortmann and Werner Kuhn. Affordances as Qualities
Anusuriya Devaraju and Werner Kuhn. A Process-Centric Ontological Approach for Integrating Geo-Sensor Data
Simon Scheider, Florian Probst and Krzysztof Janowicz. Constructing Bodies and their...
November 2009
3 posts
Brown Bag: Artefacts and Roles: Modeling...
Comments on our Brown Bag reading:
L. Vieu, S. Borgo, and C. Masolo. Artefacts and Roles: Modeling Strategies in a Multiplicative Ontology. In Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008), pages 121–134. IOS Press, 2008.
On Entity Stacking: Entity stacking is based on multiple layers: amount of...
Brown Bag: Geoprocessing Semantics
In today’s brown bag we tried to find out what we exactly understand as geoprocessing. The discussion originated in a paper we are currently writing for next year’s AGILE conference.
Geoprocessing is sometimes simply explained as transformation of geospatial data using common Desktop GIS. This view limits geoprocesses to basic operators like applying a buffer, clipping data, merging or...