Geospatial Meaning

Some weeks ago I post a way to embed Semantic Web engines, Jena and Pellet in .NET solutions. Recently I had an odd behaviour when persisting RDF models to a file via Model.write and Model.writeall methods.

Fortunately it was just a bug from IKVM version 0.34.0.2 (The JVM with .NET). I’ve tested it with the last version of IKVM 0.36.0.11 and the problem is solved.

In order to have Pellet, Jena and SQL Server working in .NET just follow the guidelines of the previous post, but downloading the last version of Pellet, and using the updated .bat file.

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.

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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.

Geospatial Semantic Web sounds great. You can organize a conference with this title, and everyone will think your a genious, or at least you’re a mad scientist.

Locations are increasing importance everywhere in the web. And it’s easily understandable, most of information has a geographic dimension. In the last two years we’ve added this dimension to our popular Web 2.0. By 01/01/2008, Wikipedia had 7,5 million articles and 800,000 of them were geotagged using geonames. 2,2 million photos were geotagged in Flickr, Just in December 2007!. And the list of social webs that allows resources geotagging, or collaborative mapping, grows every day, Youtube, Picasa, Panoramio, Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap etc.

As we can see in the image from google trends, although geospatial enabled applications (Panoramio, Wikimapia) are growing in popularity quite fast, more theorical related topics haven’t taken off already (semantic web, geospatial, geo web).

It’s amazing how hundreds of thousands of people are collaborating to these geo - apps for free, but for some of us, a geographically enabled Web 2.0 is not enough. We want more (just a bit more?).

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