Geospatial resources use in tertiary education: shaping the future

Last week, I attended a workshop organised and run by EDINA, as part of the eFramework workpackage of the SEE-GEO project. The aim of the workshop was to inform future planning and to begin thinking about how geospatial resources might work in a future world. We were asked to look ahead around 5 years - the general consensus was that we would be seeing an evolution rather than a revolution in that time e.g. ubiquity of geo info.

Opportunities and Challenges

Social/political/economic:

• economics of information - IPR; FoI; access and exploitation
• what about the knowledge that doesn't lend itself to a digital format?
• how to handle digital persona - virtual communities and alternative economies
• divisive nature of technology - a new division of class according to access to technology? does it disenfranchise or empower?

Technological

• standards and interoperability - impact of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo?
• how to manage fast paced change and multiple devices
• still a need to teach and train experts - geo experts will be needed, deeper learning for experts
• domination of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo - driving technology but have also helped put GI in mainstream
• data deluge
• protection/privacy/access/reuse
• embedding (what does embedding really mean?)

Research

• need an underlying basic IT infrastructure (e.g. grid, visualisation, mobile) with a spatial infrastructure (e.g. spatial ontologies) overlaid on top
• Google/Microsoft/Yahoo challenge - raises expectations; discourages sharing?; how well does it transfer to academia?
• methodologies - lack of skills here - mashups are not research; need to develop more analytical skills in young researchers
• data - integrity; interoperability; creation (new, repurposed); sharing
• policy - IPR; funding; publication; RAE/REF; tracking development of information
• collaboration - technological, social, learning with industry

Enablers

Data/Content

• Data is currently in layers and "all over the place"
• What will INSPIRE achieve?
• funding for infrastructure: interoperability; storage; distribution
• role of community generated data
• quality and validation
• semantic enrichment
• where does Google/Yahoo/Microsoft fit?
• Research Council mandates are not enforced
• how does a researcher deposit a dataset/database?
• depth/breadth tension

Tools/Technology

• there is a disconnect between creator and dataset - need provenance info - data/process broker, intelligent catalogue
• (web) services lead to fundamental changes in models of use e.g. do you need processing power alongside the data - remote processing
• "handy" mobile needed - portable, light, multiple ports, GPS, wearable
• sensor networks and notion of central storage
• tools/portals enable virtual world immersion - deeper sense of telepresence
• can we learn from games technology?
• consolidated and converged technologies
• collaboration and sharing - less travel?
• different publication needs - raw data; code; published papers

Skills, knowledge, people

• wider promotion of geo info
• compulsory GI education
• funders to encourage outputs to be disseminated
• policy framework
• repositories, portals, databases
• need for academic level specialist support
• career development
• professional development
• networks and communities of practice

Legal/policy

• funding for methodological development e.g. spatial methods for Grid
• copyright and intellectual property - derived data, watermarking, commercialisation
• training - cross-disciplinary; quality
• data and standards development - involving user communities
• ethics - code of practice; awareness of issues; data integrity; monitoring
• support - policy to encourage networking
• data access policy - feasibility and extent of info in public domain
• access/usage permissions - who has the right to grant permissions? authentication in a global context
• collaborative support - policy to enable multi-centre, multidisciplinary, multisector, multinational activity

Social/institutional/economic

• social software/networking tools
• wider dissemination of metadata beyond traditional subject boundaries
• cultural change to cite datasets
• links between universities and schools
• changing demography e.g. >adult learners
• funding - different streams - staffing, content, experimentation
• benefits - clear roles/responsibilities
• free or pay to view infrastructure
• alternative (i.e. to OS) providers now available
• entrepreneurial drivers
• REF/RAE should effectively recognise complex and hybrid digital outputs
• institutional or subject repositories
• nervousness about depositing material
• support to clear confusion re IPR especially in relation to derived data

There was some discussion about the role of JISC and its Geospatial Working Group so some messages to feed back.

Also, as an aside, I talked with Dr Douglas Cawthorne from De Montfort Uni in Leicester - they are involved in a large project to map Leicester - the result will be a multilayered map, showing the current city, the Roman city, social maps, emotive maps etc and will incorporate user generated content e.g. photos. Something to watch out for...

BCS blog entry on geo DRM

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.427

SEE-GEO gets mention in latest OGF newsletter

http://www.ogf.org/News/newscal_newsletter.php#link2

Transformational government

Computing (10 April) reports on the government's plans to engage with the public, using social networking and other intiatives. Interestingly, it mentions a "Whitehall taskforce spearheaded by [Tom] Watson will look at wider moves into information sharing between government and the public". It reports on the success of Netmums and NHS Choices as a spur for doing more in this vein. It also mentions work already underway including "opening up Ordnance Survey data for mash-ups" and the role of Land Registry, OS and the Hydrographic Office in improving public access to information.

Visualisations for geosciences

Just came across this on a post by ResourceShelf last month:
http://www.free.ed.gov/resource.cfm?resource_id=2030

Ocean science projects using OGC standards

The latest OGC newsletter features a short overview of ocean science projects using OGC standards: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/newsletters/200803. The list of projects includes MOTIIVE on which the new COMPASS project is built.

OGC and OASIS collaborating on standards

Press release from OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/849) about their collaboration with OASIS:
"The groups point to Web services as a key area of their cooperation. With the existing OGC Web Services (OWS) standards, most of the standards needed to publish, discover and use Web-resident geospatial data and services on the Web are in place. However, OWS must work in concert with other Web services standards. That's why OGC members approved the ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) OASIS Standard as the preferred cataloging meta-model foundation for future application profiles of the OpenGIS® Catalog Service Web (CS-W) Standard. "

New guide to geospatial resources in humanities

AHESSC has produced a very readable guide to geospatial resources and services in the humanities:
http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/geospatial-resources

Google labs - experimental search

Just had a quick and fun play with Google's experimental search - map, info and timeline views. Can see the potential for these ideas particularly map, now that geospatial info is becoming so widely used. I'd be interested to learn more about how the map view works - is there a gazetteer behind the scenes? How is Google distinguishing between places which have the same name? This is the sort of results view that would be useful for other search tools e.g. Runners World events listing where you could easily see where future races are, and know instantly if it's somewhere you want to travel to or not (especially if contour info was on there too so the hilly ones can be spotted!).

The Argo project

Mentioned on the BCS-KIDDM list this week, the ARGO project is interesting not only for the work it's doing in measuring vital information on our oceans, but in the way it is managing data. The real-time data are freely offered to anyone and can be downloaded from the web. The project involves around 30 countries including the UK (managed by the Met Office, with partners: the National Oceanography Centre, the British Oceanographic Data Centre and the UK Hydrographic Office). UK involvement is jointly funded by Defra, MoD and NERC.
http://www.argo.net/

Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructures Workshop

I managed to catch some of the Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructures Workshop today, part of the eSI programme and hosted by the Welsh eScience Centre. Here are my quick notes...


Rob Lemmens from International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation talked about end-user tools. He outlined the different approaches of corporate/national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) which is a centralised approach and Web 2.0 which is community driven. SDIs are based on stricter rules for annotation and accuracy tends to be higher than Web 2.0 tools, although this is changing. Rob outlined the need for a semantic interoperability framework (combination of ontologies, their relationships and methods for ontology-based description of info sources - data sets, services etc) and a semantic interoperability infrastructure (comprises framework and the tools to maintain and use the framework as well as the information sources produced within this framework). Rob's presentation also included a slide outlining the characteristics of an ontology which was a good representation and a demonstration of ontology visualisation (same tool which ASSERT is using for clustering?). Rob concluded by summarising what the geospatial community can learn and take from Web 2.0, for example tagging/tag clouds, tools for building ontologies (community tagging e.g Google Image Labeller), instant feedback (e.g. password strength bars when selecting a new password) - on the negative side, community-driven tagging can lead to weak semantics. Rob suggests combining the best of both SDI and Web 2.0 worlds - map the SDI and Web2.0 ontologies to create dynamic annotations of geo sources, thus improving discovery.



Ulrich Bugel from Fraunhofer Institut IITB presented on ontology based discovery and annotation of resources in geospatial applications. Ulrich talked about the ORCHESTRA project (http://www.eu-orchestra.org/) which aims to design and implement an open service-oriented architecture to improve interoperability in a risk management setting (e.g. how big is the risk of a forest fire in a certain region of the Pyrenees in a given season?). This question has spatial references (cross-border, cross-administration); temporal references (time series and prognostics); thematic reference (forest fire); and conceptual reference (what is risk?). ORCHESTRA will build a service network to address these sorts of question. Interoperability is discussed on 3 levels - syntactic (encodings), structural (schemas, interfaces), semantic (meaning). The project has produced the Reference Model for the ORCHESTRA Architecture (RM-OA), drawing on standards from OGC, OASIS, W3C, ISO 191xx, ISO RM-ODP. Many iterations of the Reference Model which led to Best Practice status at OGC. The ORCHESTRA Architecture comprises a number of semantic services: Annotation Service automatically generates meta-information from sources and relates them to elements of an ontology; Ontology Access Service enabling high-level access and queries to ontologies; Knowledge Base Service; Semantic Catalogue Service.



Ian Holt from Ordnance Survey presented on geospatial semantics research at OS. OS has one of the largest geospatial databases, unsurprisingly, with 400 million features and over 2000 concepts. Benefits of semantics research: quality control, better classification; semantic web enablement, semi-automated data integration, data and product repurposing; data mining - i.e. benefits to OS and to customers. OS has developed a topographic domain ontology which provides a framework for specifying content. www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology. Developed ontologies for hydrology; administrative geography; buildings and places. Working on addresses; settlements; and land forms. Supporting modules on mereology, spatial relations, network topology. Conceptual ontology- knowledge represented in a form understandable by people vs computational topology - knowledge represented in a form understandable by computers. A controlled natural language called Rabbit has been developed - structured English, compilable to OWL. OS is also part of the OWL 1.1. task force to develop a controlled natural language syntax. A project currently underway developing plug in for Protege with Leeds University - allows natural language descriptions and in the back end, will translate into an OWL model. The first release is scheduled for December with further release planned for March 08. Ian also talked about experimental work to semantically describe gazetteers - an RDF version (downloadable?) to represent the data and OWL ontology to describe the concepts. This work includes administrative regions and work underway to include cities etc. Through their work, OS has experienced some problems with RDF - e.g. may degrade performance (they have >10 billion triples); how much is really needed?. Ian described some work on semantic data integration e.g. "find all addresses with a taxable value over £500,000 in Southampton" so looking at how to merge ontologies (i.e. creating another ontology rather than interoperability between the two). Ian briefly covered some lessons learned - ontologies are never perfect and can't offer complete descriptions of any domain; automatic tools are used as far as possible. Ian also describe work on linking ontologies to databases using D2RQ which maps SPARQL queries to SQL, creating "virtual" RDF. Conclusions : domain experts need to be at the centre of the process; technology transfer is difficult - benefits of semantics in products and applications must be clarified.

Alun Preece from Cardiff University presented on an ontology-based approach to assigning sensors to tasks. The idea is to bridge the gap between people out in the field needing to make decisions (e.g. disaster management) and the data/information produced from networks of sensors and other sources. Issues tackled: data orchestration (determine, locate, characterise resources required); reactive source deployment (repurpose, move, redeploy resources); push/pull data delivery. The approach is ontology-centric and involves semantic matchmaking. Work on proof of concept - SAM (Sensor Assignment for Missions) software prototype and integration with a sensor network. This work is funded by US/UK to support military application - intelligence, surveillance and reconaissance (ISR) requirements. The work uses ontologies to specify ISR requirements of a mission (e.g. night surveillance, intruder detection) and to specify the ISR capabilities provided by different asset types. Uses semantic reasoning to compare mission requirements and capabilities and to decide if requirements are satisfied. For example, if a mission requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), the ontology would specify different types of UAV and the requirements of the mission (e.g. high altitude to fly above weather, endurance) and the semantic matchmaking (exact, subsuming, overlapping, disjoint) then leads to a preferred choice. The project has engaged with domain experts to get the information into the ontology and to share conceptualisations. Alun showed the Mission and Means Framework Ontology which is a high-level ontology which is fleshed out with more specific concepts.

Slides from the workshop will be uploaded to http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=832

Gnizr

Have come across this twice this week, both times in a geospatial context. The Geospatial Semantic Web blog describes Gnizr, a new open source application http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2007/11/16/gnizr-open-source. One of my projects is considering using Gnizr, possibly with its sister application KnowledgeSmarts, which I don't think is open source. (More info at http://code.google.com/p/gnizr/ and http://www.imagemattersllc.com/products/gnizr.php)

Chris Date Lecture @ NeSC

The latest NeSC newsletter http://www.nesc.ac.uk/news/newsletter/November07.pdf features a report on the Chris Date Lecture last month. Highlights:

"Bill Pike (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), in his presentation on integrating knowledge models into the scientific analysis process [...] described the challenge of trying to capture scientific knowledge as it is created, with workflow models that describe the process of discovery. In this way, the knowledge of what was discovered can be connected with
the knowledge of how the discovery was made."

"If future generations of scientists are to understand the work of the present, we have to make sure they have access to the processes by which our knowledge is being formed. The big problem is that, if you include all the information about all the people, organisations, tools, resources and situations that feed into a particular piece of knowledge, the sheer quantity of data will rapidly become overwhelming. We need to find ways to filter this knowledge to create sensible structures... "

"One method for explicitly representing knowledge was presented by Alberto Canas (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). The concept maps that he discussed are less ambiguous than natural language, but not as formal as symbolic logic. Designed to be read by humans, not machines, they have proved useful for finding holes and misconceptions in knowledge, and for understanding how an expert thinks. These maps are composed of concepts joined up by linking phrases to form propositions: the logical structure expressed in these linking phrases is what distinguishes concept maps from similar-looking, but less structured descriptions such as "mind maps". "

Data sharing

Useful links:
OECD Principles (2007): http://www.oecd.org/document/55/0,3343,en_2649_37417_38500791_1_1_1_37417,00.html

RIN's Stewardship of Digital Research Data (2007): http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-principles

MRC's Guidelines on data sharing: http://www.mrc.ac.uk/PolicyGuidance/EthicsAndGovernance/DataSharing/PolicyonDataSharingandPreservation/index.htm

BBSRC's Guidelines on data sharing: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/support/guidelines/datasharing/context.html

Plus some interesting outputs from JISC-funded projects:

• Liz Lyon's Dealing with Data report: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories/project_dealing_with_data.aspx. A very comprehensive overview with a list of recommendations which is now being reviewed by JISC.


• GRADE project : http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/Grade_reportRSSv2.pdf. Found that researchers most commonly use USB stick and email to share small datasets. Also noted that as well as enabling sharing/preservation, a national repository would enable UK to contribute to European and other international intiatives.


• DISC-UK Datashare : http://www.disc-uk.org/docs/state-of-the-art-review.pdf. One interesting finding reported is from Australian colleagues who found that a single repository wasn't proving effective and they subsequently moved towards two distinct repositories: one to enable collaboration on work-in-progress and one for published outputs/datasets.

There's a lot in these links about the wider context; how things look now; barriers to data sharing (e.g. trust, IPR, time); discussion on possible solutions (e.g. social software models, reward/recognition, mandates).

OGSA-DAI 3.0

NeSC's October newsletter (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/news/newsletter/October07.pdf) features a news item announcing the release of OGSA-DAI 3.0. It includes a clear description of why OGSA-DAI is needed and what it does - one of the simplest explanations I've seen! It also uses SEE-GEO as an example of how OGSA-DAI is being used in the community.

OGF21 - interesting snippets

This time round OGF featured a Semantic Grid theme which I think was either missing or limited last time round as the Manchester event clashed with the WWW conference in Banff. There were a number of presentations on Web2.0 including:

• Savas Parastatidis from Microsoft talking about "the cloud" http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/materials/1031/2007.10.15%20-%20OGF%20-%20Web%202.0-Cloud%20Era%20and%20its%20Impact%20on%20how%20we%20do%20Research.pdf
• Dave de Roure talking about the JISC-funded myExperiment (VRE2) http://www.ogf.org/OGF21/materials/1030/OGF21myExperiment.ppt

And of course not forgetting the geospatial stuff...
http://www.gridforum.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=960

OGF and OGC MoU

At OGF21, the OGF and OGC signed a Memorandum of Understanding. According to the OGF's Grid Connections Newsletter (Nov 07), the goals of the collaboration will include:
"1.) Integrate OGC's Web Processing Service (WPS) with a range of "back-end" processing environments to enable large-scale processing. The WPS could also be used as a front-end to interface to multiple grid infrastructures, such as TeraGrid, NAREGI, EGEE, and the UK's National Grid Service. This would be an application driver for both grid and data interoperability issues.
2.) Integration of WPS with workflow management tools. OGF’s SAGA draft standard is where multiple WPS calls could be managed.
3.) Integration of OGC Federated Catalogues/Data Repositories with grid data movement tools. OGF’s GridFTP is one possibility that supports secure, third-party transfers that are useful when moving data from a repository to a remote service.
However, the real goal is not just to do science, but to greatly enhance things like operational hurricane forecasting, location-based services, and anything to do with putting data on a map. WPS is just a starting point for the collaboration. As the two organizations engage and build mutual understanding of technical requirements and approaches, many other things will be possible. "

Cool mashup: migrating swans

This is a nice example of a mashup, using Google Maps to track the migration of swans from Iceland to UK/Ireland. You can follow their flights on the map (though it's hard to get the right scale) and be kept up to date with RSS feeds
http://www.wwt.org.uk/superwhooper/573/super_whooper.html

Building models of the world from Flickr photos

New Scientist article:
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn12846&feedId=online-news_rss20

Follow on from the TED Photosynth demo
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

OGC News October 2007

Latest issue of OGC News has a couple of interesting links:

- info on and link to their Spatial Data Quality survey, which will inform the Spatial Data Quality Working Group's attempts to define a framework and grammar for the certification and communication of spatial data quality

- a slideshow demonstrating the use of OGC standards for earth observation.