Geospatial Meaning

I wrote a post about an INTEL initiative for innovative ideas to help poor nations. Now Google has released the 10¹⁰⁰ project. They offer $10 million to implement the best 100 ideas that can help the most number of people posible.

Some of the categories of evaluation are Energy, Enviroment, health, Education, Shelter and Communitiy. I think it is worth a look, and submit your idea in a total maximum of 1050 words. You will be evaluated with these criteria:

- Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
- Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
- Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
- Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
- Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

A video explaining Google initiative:

Unknown Face

Your face will be indexed. Be sure. Does it make you shudder? Ah-ah-ah. It is not sci-fi. Something so extended as Picasa is already capable to search and sort photos on face value. Yes, it is a great chance to populate ontologies but it gives the machines more power to know everything about you.

Face-finding has made huge improvements recent years. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system that can recognize faces in low resolution videos.

Freedom, privacy, information access… just think that when you upload something to the web you are providing more information than you thought.

Brueghel, Tower Of Babel

The UNL, Universal Networking Language, is an ambitious initiative from United Nations that began in 1996. The UNL is an artificial computer language that replicates the functions of natural languages. It is one of the attempts to build a pivot computer language for machine translation.

Researchers from the group of  Validation and Business Applications , based at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) have take advantage of UNL and its idea of Universal Word (UW) stems to build multilingual ontologies.

The use of universal words can reduce the ambiguity and diversity of ontologies, which are failing at providing universal representations of concepts within a domain because of its English centered nature.

They have presented a case study using the contents of the current catalogue of Spanish monuments as part of the Patrilex project.

Geospatial Semantic Web is gradually establishing as a Research proper field. Terra Cognita, a specialized Workshop in conjuntion with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference is going to be held in Karlsruhe, Germany.

A great chance to share experiences and ideas with geospatial and semantic web experts.

See you there.

The Intel’s INSPIRE-EMPOWER challenge offers $100000 for innovative projects that can help to better the education, healthcare, economic development, or the environment of people in poor nations.

Morro de Carapina, Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, Brazil

It is worth a thought how can 1st world researchers cooperate with new ideas with these people with less geographic luck. Poverty belongs to certain countries, or regions, or neighbourhoods in some cities. This reality is extremely harsh in a very rich country as Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of people leave in the favelas, with no chance to improve their lives in their heavily conditioned context, spatial enviroment.