Introduction (was: Re: GSoC denied)
Markus Stocker
@Gary, thanks for adding me to the list.
Given that Ferdinando recently mentioned me here, I thought it would
be good to say hello and spend a few words on who I am. I'm currently
doing a PhD in environmental engineering (informatics) at the
University of Eastern Finland (Kuopio Campus) [1] in my first year,
mainly collecting credits. My background is in computer science
(informatics & a minor in economics) from the University of Zurich [2]
(I'm Swiss). Between MSc graduation and the PhD, I did intern with HP
Labs Bristol (UK) with the (recently dissolved) Jena team and with
Clark & Parsia in Washington DC [3].
I have known the existence of the UVM Ecoinformatics Collaboratory for
some time, but I only recently contacted Ferdinando (via IDSIA [4]).
The motivation was both related to the PhD and the semantic web but
also because of the close ties of the group with the Gund Institute
for Ecological Economics, a field that has interested me, albeit
mainly in private.
I'm looking for an area and problem to focus on for the PhD and I
figured having some discussions with Ferdinando might inspire this
process especially w.r.t pointing the sailing ship toward some
meaningful direction :> Ideally, I'll have some concrete thoughts and
a rough plan by the end of the summer.
Any comments, questions, etc. please don't hesitate to send me an email.
Cheers,
markus
[1] http://envi.uku.fi/en/
[2] http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/
[3] http://clarkparsia.com
[4] http://idsia.ch
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Ferdinando Villa
<ferdinan...@uvm.edu> wrote:
> Agreed. Also have a look at the spatial reasoning resources in the message I
> paste in - we're in touch with Markus (CC'd) as much as my scattered
> response patterns allow, and he has expressed an interest in collaborating
> with us in some form.
>
> Ciao f
>
> ---
>
> Hi Ferdinando,
>
> Thanks for the documentation and for the chat earlier today.
>
> I wanted to mention two additional things. The first is PelletSpatial [1] a
> project that I initiated last summer and is now hosted by Clark & Parsia
> that extends Pellet with qualitative spatial reasoning capabilities for RCC
> [2] data represented in RDF/OWL. I'm planning to build on this project with
> an ArcGIS seminar later this semester. The idea is to suggest a project that
> looks into accessing quantitative ArcGIS data and transforming (part of) it
> to a qualitative RCC description in RDF/OWL. This would (1) interface ArcGIS
> with PelletSpatial and (2) enable the exposure of ArcGIS data on the
> Semantic Web (thus, potentially make access to data easier).
>
> The second is another idea I recently had after a soil ecology class with a
> slide on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
> [3] World Soil Classification. The official document can be found here [4].
> I think, the entire (public) taxonomy and all the related information is
> essentially locked up in a PDF, which I found awful. So I wrote an email to
> Craig Ditzler [5], with a quick description on SW technologies and how a
> soil ontology and having the knowledge more accessible etc. might be useful.
> He sounded very interested and mentioned someone who was working on a
> Finnish version of the taxonomy back in 2000. I have been thinking that it
> might be worth spending some time this summer looking into this together
> with the Finnish researcher and see if we can come of with a prototype.
>
> Feel free to forward me any thoughts or comments you may have.
>
> Cheers,
> markus
>
> [1] http://clarkparsia.com/pellet/spatial
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_Connection_Calculus
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAO_soil_classification
> [4] ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/NSSC/Soil_Taxonomy/tax.pdf
> [5] http://soils.usda.gov/technical/classification/taxonomy/
>
>
> ---
> Ferdinando Villa, Ph.D.
> Research Professor, Ecoinformatics Collaboratory
> Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont
> http://ecoinformatics.uvm.edu
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: aries-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:aries-...@googlegroups.com]
> On Behalf Of Gary Johnson
> Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 11:16 AM
> To: aries-...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: GSoC denied
>
> The thinkGeo idea sounds like a good direction to me. Semantic GIS
> toolkits = Fun.
>
> Good luck,
> ~Gary
>
> Tara Athan <tara...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Gary- Ferd wasn't terribly excited with the idea either, so I'm inclined
>> to forget about it and concentrate on other things.
>>
>> The most promising direction at the moment is carving out a section of
>> thinklab (core, corescience, geo, time & modelling) and preparing it for
>> application to OSGeo for incubation (thinkGeo?). My dissertation advisor
>> was OK on that idea, provided I also provide some new functionality, such
>> as implementing a numerical classification type. There is some interest
>> from our local OSGeo chapter, and I am tryig to get ahold of someone on
>> the OSGeo incubation committee. Most likely to be interested would be Jody
>> Garnett of geotools fame, who has recently moved from refractions in
>> Canada to LisaSoft in oz - I've sent emails through a couple of channels-
>> we'll see if any get through.
>>
>> And then there is this geoserver keywords thing which I am going OCD on...
>>
>> Tara
>>
>> Gary Johnson wrote:
>>
>> Tara,
>>
>> GDAL/OGR is written in ANSI C and C++. Porting it (although it is
>> rather large) to Clojure would be very interesting from the standpoint
>> of learning about geospatial algorithms. However, what you would end
>> up with is a Java library, since that is what Clojure compiles into.
>>
>> Now, this could be very nice for someone who wanted to use GDAL/OGR
>> from Java. Currently, there exist Java bindings for it, but they are
>> only complete for the C++ part of the API. A port would make the
>> entire system available (and in Clojure, exceptionally thread-safe).
>>
>> It should be noted though that there is a LARGE Java library called
>> GeoTools which provides most (if not all) of the GDAL/OGR
>> functionality and is the typical solution for Java geospatial
>> programmers. So I'm not really sure that I can recommend the port in
>> good faith.
>>
>> Perhaps Ferdinando can weigh in with his opinion on the matter.
>>
>> ~Gary
>>
>> Tara Athan <tara...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>
>> Unfortunately the Ecoinformatics Collaboratory was not accepted into
>> the Google Summer of Code Program for 2010. However, OSGeo was. I
>> looked through their project list to see if there were any suggested
>> developments that might be of value to us. One that caught my
>> attention was : make GDAL and/or OGR more thread-safe. Any thoughts
>> on the value of porting GDAL or OGR into clojure?
>>
>> Tara
>>
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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>
>
Tara Athan
kind, I am a student working on a master's in GIS with the University of
Leeds. I have a prior background of many years in mathematical modelling
(Ph.D. in applied mathematics) and risk analysis. Up until recently my
master's dissertation was also the "sailing ship", but I have finally
settled on the establishment of "thinkGeo" as as branch of thinklab for
my topic, as discussed in earlier posts that you may not have seen if
you were just added to the mailing list (they should be in the archives).
Regarding your thesis topics: The first topic you mention would be a
nice fit with thinkGeo, as it is primarily geospatial in focus and not
specific to any application domain. You would be most welcome into the
thinkGeo community, if you are interested. We plan to keep thinklab and
thinkGeo closely aligned, there will most likely be mergers back and
forth. The main purpose of the branch is to get more exposure within
OSGeo, and to lower the barriers for users and developers to join the
effort by presenting a smaller codebase with more extensive and
accessible documentation. Please take a look at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/ThinkGeo , you will see that there is not
much there yet, but it is a beginning.
The second topic you mention is specific to ecological economics and so
would fit with the ARIES effort. Either way you decide to go, we would
be pleased to welcome you to the team.
Best regards, Tara
Markus Stocker
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Tara Athan <tara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Welcome, Markus.
Thanks.
> Regarding your thesis topics: The first topic you mention would be a nice
> fit with thinkGeo, as it is primarily geospatial in focus and not specific
> to any application domain. You would be most welcome into the thinkGeo
> community, if you are interested.
The project is planned for a seminar and I hope to have some results
by the end of this month. Related, more recently I wondered if a
"semantic layer on top of GIS" could provide some meaningful automated
testing of GIS models and an explanation service (not unlike standard
Description Logic services) for possible modeling errors. Assume that
a GIS layer models regions of one type (e.g. biotopes) and a second
models regions of another type (e.g. cities) and those two regions
cannot overlap (or can't to some degree of probability). It seems that
all a typical GIS knows are polygons and it doesn't really care
whether two overlapping regions might be a modeling error. A
transformation to RCC regions and coupling this with an OWL reasoner
might give some joy w.r.t automatic detection of such modeling errors.
But, I have to note this is not more than a thought right now and
perhaps I'll have some clearer ideas soon. I'm happy to share the
results with you.
Cheers,
markus