Geo-Semantics and Interoperability for Spatial Data and Technology Joshua Lieberman Traverse Technologies Inc. SOCoP Workshop, Mc Lean, VA, October 17, 2008

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 2 Introduction Rapid change is occurring in geospatial aspects (among others) of information science and technology Certain concepts are playing key roles in this change: –Infrastructure –Standards –Interoperability –Semantics Not yet clear what these roles are, nor whether change is a peaceful evolution or a bloody revolution Geospatial questions: –What is unique about geospatial (-temporal) information? –What is so hard about geospatial? –Can any information really be non-geospatial (-temporal)?

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 3 Geospatial (R)Evolutions Geospatial Semantic Web: forming and distributing rich geospatial relationships across the Web KML / GeoRSS: adding features to information Google Earth: the terrain as video game GeoWeb: connecting features across the Web GIS: adding information to features Cartography: symbolic representation of the terrain Geography: perception of the terrain

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 4 Problems of Geospatial Interoperability Interoperability has many aspects and roles in enabling –Sharing of information –Interchanging of technologies, protocols, platforms across space and time Geospatial –Maps and map visualization –Features and feature geometries –Geographic and other relationships –Coordinate and other reference systems Web –Distributed data - “own and maintain locally / find and access globally” –Service orientation - decouple behavior from implementation –Interchangeability of technologies, vendors, architectures Semantic –Interoperability between communities and domains –Softer software –Automated (machine to machine) reasoning and inference Geosemantic –Feature discernment –Spatial reasoning –Representational agreement –Feature-with-information or Information-with-a-feature

Joshua Lieberman - BE Research Seminar 2007 ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 5 General Feature Model

Joshua Lieberman - BE Research Seminar 2007 ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 6 Interoperability Stack Meaning - ? (OWL, RDF, MDL, …) Vocabulary – UML, XML Schema, OWS Encoding - ASCII, UTF-8, XML Control – TCP, HTTP, WAP Routing – Internet Protocol, DNS Transport – Ethernet, WiFi, GPRS Medium – EM, Light Increasing / higher level interoperability - not even this is so easy Human-centric Machine-centric

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 7 But Wait, There are More (Problems) Problems of heterogeneity –Semantics: two names for the same thing –Semiotics: one name for two different things –Schizophrenia (cognitive dissonance): two names for two different things LighthouseVertical Obstruction

Joshua Lieberman - BE Research Seminar 2007 ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 8 Adding to the Interoperability Stack Intention – generalization, prediction Perception – visual - aural - tactile Theory - persistence, consequence Discernment – feature, context Application – discovery, analysis Representation– geometry, address Ontology – domain, upper, lower, foundation Increasing / higher level interoperability Human-centric Machine-centric

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 9 Simple Standards vs Complex Software Standards represent agreement on the details of one or more interoperability stack layers “Simple” standards tend to be most widely adopted. Successful standards support many activities with few choices. Semantic technology offers more choice through more “intelligent” (and more complex) software What role, then, do semantic or geosemantic standards play? Is this a contradiction? Can there be simple geosemantic standards?

Geosemantic Web Challenges Geosemantic agent architecture is un-developed and un- proven Ontologies and formal encodings for geospatial knowledge are not yet established in practice Geosemantic knowledge is “hidden” in textual description, cartographic craft, and syntax specifications: people-actionable versus machine-actionable Generalized geospatial inference is hard to design and harder to implement Killer app to drive investment in the Geosemantic Web has not yet been discovered Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies.

Slide 11 GeoRSS 1.0 Content “Featurizing” Model Content

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 12 Geo

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 13 Geosemantic Standards I Geo - the geotagging, featurizing OWL ontology developed from GeoRSS. Feature ontology - a representation of the OGC / ISO General Feature Model as a basis for expressing feature information Feature type ontology - the (50?) basic types of geographic features that everyone should understand. Geospatial relationship ontology - the basic geospatial / topological / mereological relationships. Includes the rigorous ones (e.g. intersects) and some of the most common tangled human ones (next-door-to)

Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies. Slide 14 Geosemantic Standards II Toponym ontology - the basis for building a global gazetteer, the geospatial counterpart to the Domain Naming System. Coordinate reference system / spatial index ontology, the former when WGS84 isn’t enough for all information, the latter for spatial indexes and content tiles. Geodataset / metadata ontology - those classical descriptions of geoinformation which really do apply to a large number of SII applications, such as provenance, quality, status. Geospatial Services Ontology - basic extensions to services ontologies which address service behavior and usability as a function of the types and extents of coupled geoinformation content.

Mediation (translation) between community concepts Query expansion to add additional concepts Inference simplification (e.g. coordinate -> topology) to support reasoning Consumer Provider Trader Mediation Search Concepts Resource Concepts Binding Concepts Provider Query Expansion Related Concepts BBOX( , , , ) {within Boston} Geosemantic Roles Within GeoWeb Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies.

Geosemantic GeoWeb Tasks Tag resources with formal concepts Develop mappings between concepts from different communities Develop mediation components with standard interfaces for integration into geospatial services architectures Expand and persist framework feature / toponym sets to support computation of topological relationships “the way people think of space” Specify standard representations for the 8 (Egenhofer) spatial relationship operators to support search mediation interoperability (c.f. Geosearch initiative). Joshua Lieberman ©Traverse Technologies.