Geospatial Meaning

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.

The Semantic Web is gradually going from the research cage to the real implementation world. Most of real semantic applications mix some knowledge base, inference engines, etc. with traditional object oriented software. We have to make the most of our current business knowledge and professional skills to be able to unleash the Semantic Web.

And that means that Semantic Web should be capable to talk with traditional open source software, object oriented programming languages, web services, etc. etc.

As an example, I had to add some semantic power to a Geospatial Web application for Cinespace, an European FP6 project (I will talk about it soon).

There are several posts which tell how to hack Jena and Mono/C#, or converting Jena to .NET. But there is not a source telling how to use Pellet and Jena using SLQ Server for persistence. This will allow us to have an OWL DL inference engine over a RDB store.

I’ll explain how to set up this system step by step in this post, with updated Pellet and Jena versions and two examples to test the configuration.

(more…)

This is a reply to a fantastic post named Artificial Stupidity: The Next Big Thing. by Nova Spivack.

In this post the author presents the following ideas:

• He doubts that computers will be able to make intelligent decissions (comparing to humans).
• We should concentrate mainly on low level thinking software (organizing, tagging, linking, remembering, etc.).
• We should let humans making complex thinking, decission making, learning, teaching, problem solving, etc. etc.

The big point in this post lies in reducing our aims. Humans are working on AI since 1950s, and the Nexus 6 has not been built yet. And we are not going to build it soon.

I think most of people working with Semantic Web has this idea in mind. We don’t expect the web to sing Daisy Bell as HAL did, but perhaps humans are not so intelligent as Nova states, and computers could be smarter than he says.

I will follow the knowledge stairs.  (more…)

The W3C launched the December 12th 2007 a new Incubator Group to review the vocabularies used in Emergency Management functions, and to investigate the path forward via an emergency management systems information interoperability framework.

Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group home page.

Instructions to join the Incubator Group:

W3C Advisory Committee Representatives may join this XG on behalf of their organizations by completing this online form. Non-Members may join W3C or ask the Chair of an Incubator Group to participate as an Invited Expert, subject to W3C’s policy for approval of Invited Experts.