SimCat

The title pretty much says it all – here’s the paper:

Carsten Keßler and Krzysztof Janowicz (2010) Linking Sensor Data – Why, to What, and How? In Kerry Taylor, Arun Ayyagari, David De Roure (Eds.): Proceedings of the 3rd International workshop on Semantic Sensor Networks 2010 (SSN10) in conjunction with the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010), 7–11 November 2010, Shanghai, China. CEUR-WS vol. 668.

Please keep in mind that the ‘e’ in SIM-DL beta2.3.1e similarity server stands for experimental. This versions has nice new features such as the user’s similarity estimations tab but also a lot of issues (there seems to be also a bug when using 64bit Java) which may lead to strange results. In many cases, the older versions may work better…

SIM-DL_A should be available within the next months and will support Protege 4 and so forth.

The paper An Agenda for the Next Generation Gazetteer: Geographic Information Contribution and Retrieval by Carsten Keßler, Krzysztof Janowicz and Mohamed Bishr won the best student paper award at this years ACM GIS conference in Seattle.

A warm welcome to Christoph Mülligann and Johannes Trame, who joined the SimCat team this month. They are already digging deep into code, so expect some updates to the similarity server and Protégé plugin in the near future!

We have also published a couple of papers over the summer, check them out here.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Third International Conference on Geospatial Semantics (GeoS 2009)

www.geosco.org

Purpose and Scope

Geospatial semantics is an emerging research theme in the domain of geographic information systems and spatial databases. The previous editions of the conference – GeoS 2005 and GeoS 2007 in late November (Mexico City, Mexico) www.geosco.org were highly successful. We have received about 100 submissions, from which 30 regular and 8 short articles have been published in Volume 3799 and Volume 4853 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science respectively. People from 28 countries and 5 continents have attended the GeoS conferences.

The third edition GeoS 2009 www.geosco.org aims at providing a forum for the exchange of state-of-the-art research results in the areas of modeling and processing of geospatial semantics. Geospatial semantics play an important role for next-generation spatial databases and geographic information systems, as well as specialized geospatial web services. This conference traditionally brings together researchers whose expertise will address issues such as:

* Theories for geospatial semantic information
* Formal representations of geospatial data
* Models and languages for geoontologies
* Alignment and integration of geoontologies
* Integration of semantics into spatial query processing
* Spatial information retrieval
* Ontology-driven GIS
* Geospatial Semantic Web
* Multicultural aspects of spatial knowledge
* Cognitive aspects of geospatial semantics
* Measuring semantic similarity between spatial datasets
* Representing context for geospatial semantic information
* Semantic Sensor Web
* Ontology-based visualization of geospatial data
* Conceptual models of dynamic geospatial environments
* Personalization of geospatial semantic services

Paper Submissions

Authors are invited to submit full papers of approx. 18 single-spaced pages, in English, formatted in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science style (www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Papers, formatted in PDF, must be submitted through the conference web site (www.geosco.org). At least three members of the Program Committee will evaluate each paper based on scientific significance, relevance to the conference, novelty, relation to previously published literature, and clarity of presentation. The GeoS 2009 proceedings will be published as a volume in Springer’s LNCS series.

Venue

GeoS 2009 will be held at the Centro de Investigacion en Computacion (CIC) in Mexico City (www.cic.ipn.mx). The conference site has a spectacular view of the Popocatepetl volcano, which will be snow-covered at the beginning of December. Early December is the best time of the year for traveling to Mexico City with typically clear weather, moderate temperatures, and a deep blue sky.

Important Dates

Papers submission: July 31, 2009
Notification of acceptance: September 4, 2009
Submission of camera-ready papers: September 14, 2009
Registration: October 30, 2009 (early birds – October 15, 2009)
Workshops: December 1 and 2, 2009
Conference: December 3 and 4, 2009

General Chair

Sergei Levashkin, Centro de Investigación en Computación, Mexico City, Mexico

Program Co-Chairs

Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Muenster, Germany
Martin Raubal, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Local Organizing Comitee
PIIG-Lab, Centro de Investigación en Computación, Mexico City, Mexico

Miguel Martinez (chair)
Nahun Montoya
Walter Renteria
Iyeliz Reyes
Gerardo Sarabia
Linaloe Sarmiento
Roberto Zagal

Program Committee

Neeharika Adabala, Microsoft Research, India
Pragya Agarwal, University College London, UK
Ola Ahlqvist, Ohio State University, USA
Naveen Ashish, UC-Irvine, Irvine CA, USA
Ioan Marius Bilasco, FOX-MIIRE team at Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL), France
Stefano Borgo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Italy
Brandon Bennett, University of Leeds, UK
Tom Bittner, University at Buffalo, USA
Boyan Brodaric, Geological Survey of Canada, Canada
Gilberto Camara, INPE, Brazil
Isabel F. Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Clodoveu Davis Jr., Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Andrew U. Frank, Technical University Vienna, Austria
Christian Freksa, University of Bremen, Germany
Mark N. Gahegan, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Cory Andrew Henson, Wright State University, USA
Stephen Hirtle, University of Pittsburg, USA
Pascal Hitzler, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Jerry Hobbs, ISI, USA
Prateek Jain, Wright State University, USA
Christopher B. Jones, Cardiff University, UK
Marinos Kavouras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Carsten Keßler, University of Münster, Germany
Alex Klippel, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, USA
Margarita Kokla, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Dave Kolas, BBN Technologies, USA
Werner Kuhn, University of Muenster, Germany
Michael Lutz, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Italy
Miguel Felix Mata Rivera, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico
Marco Painho, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Christine Parent, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Vasily Popovich, Saint Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, RAS, Russia
Sudha Ram, University of Arizona, USA
Andrea Rodriguez, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile
Christoph Schlieder, University of Bamberg, Germany
Angela Schwering, University of Muenster, Germany
Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota, USA
Kathleen Stewart Hornsby, University of Iowa, USA
Nancy Wiegand, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Stephan Winter, University of Melbourne, Australia
Michael F. Worboys, University of Maine, USA

We just got the notification from the German Research Foundation that the project will be funded for another two years. So stay tuned for the things to come in the next weeks and months!

….but the work still goes on :). At least we will continue our work on similarity and context measures.

This release fixes some bugs in the sim-dl server 2.3 (especially the missing new features of the Protege plug-in).

The new beta versions of the SIM-DL semantic similarity server and the Protege plug-in (for 3.3.x) are available at sourceforge. Please note that this release contains a lot of experimental new features and is unstable (so using beta 2.2 may be a better idea in some cases). The new features (e.g., similarity estimations) are described in the FOIS 2008 paper linked below.

Janowicz, K., Maue, P., Wilkes, M., Braun M., Schade, S., Dupke, S., and Kuhn, W. (2008; forthcoming): Similarity as a Quality Indicator in Ontology Engineering. 5th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2008). Saarbruecken, Germany October 31st - November 3rd 2008.

We are currently running a small web-based human participants test on the visualization of result sets in information retrieval processes. We would greatly appreciate your help with this test, which should not take more than ten minutes to complete.

» start test