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Day 2 was pretty short, because the keynote had to be cancelled because the speaker was sick. The afternoon and evening was reserved for winery tour and conference dinner, so there were only two sessions. What I liked most were the robotics-related talks – it is quite impressive what these guys can already do today. I skipped the winery tour, so I cannot report on that, but the conference dinner (Australian barbecue) was very good. For those of you interested in COSIT-related journals, it might be interesting to know that Dan Montello from UCSB is going to replace Stephen Hirtle as the main editor for the Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation.

COSIT really has the perfect size for a conference like this. With roughly 120 attendants, it is a single track conference, so you never miss an interesting talk because you are in another session. Moreover, since only about ¼ of all submissions have been accepted, the level of the presentations is very high. Yet, the topics are pretty diverse. Today’s afternoon session was completely filled with presentations by current or former ifgi-people, all dealing with different approaches to similarity. The other sessions dealt with cultural studies and semantics. The opening of the poster session then was quite entertaining, since every poster author had exactly 1 minute to briefly outline what their poster is about. I am a bit afraid that the doctoral colloquium on Sunday will also consist mostly of talks which are cut off in the middle because the presentation time is over, but seven minutes is still seven times as much as the poster authors had today. So I hope people really keep in mind that there is a strict time limit for the presentations.

In general, COSIT has a very nice atmosphere and being here and talking to people is really interesting and also fun most of the time. And it is very good (both for our project and my PhD research) to see that similarity and context seem to be the hot topics at the moment.

Conference blogging, second try. This time it’s COSIT in Melbourne and the chance that I will find time to give you some updates is much bigger than it was at GI-Days, because I’m just one of the attendees in this case. We arrived Tuesday morning (after a 24 hours flight), so we still had one day left to have a look at the beautiful surroundings of the conference venue. On Wednesday, the activities started with a series of pre-conference workshops. I gave a talk at the semantic similarity measurement workshop, with some quite constructive feedback. A lot of good ideas were presented at the workshop, with lively discussions. At the dinner, I found myself sitting next to Deborah McGuiness from Stanford (one of the developers of OWL), so that was quite interesting for me, too, as OWL is one of the things we are heavily using in our SimCat project. Today will start with a keynote talk by Deborah, so I will have to take off now to make sure I don’t miss it.

Write to you later…

Obviously I have been promising too much. I must admit that I completely underestimated how time-consuming GI-Days would be. There was not even time to think about blogging about the conference. However, I will give you a short wrap-up of what happened in Münster from September 10-12 now.

The conference started with a little unofficial ice breaker event on Sunday evening, which already turned out to be quite nice. The actual conference then started on Monday with a keynote by Max Craglia from JRC, in his usual very entertaining way. In the first session of paper presentations, it already turned out that people were not at all as reluctant as we thought they might be - there were very lively discussions, and people got in touch very quickly during the breaks and at lunch. So it very much seemed like organizing a separate events only for people who are just starting their academic career might have been a very good idea. The other sessions on Monday and also Tuesday were full of very good presentations – apparently young researchers spend more time on preparing their slides than some of the experienced guys. The conference dinner was also a nice event, and I think a lot of connections were made during the two days of conference that will hopefully last a long time. The program was rounded of by some tutorials on Wednesday, which also got a very good feedback.

Summarizing, GI-Days were a very good conference, actually much better than a lot of people (including myself) had expected before. It looks like there is really a need for a distinct event only for PhD- and masters students, so we have to figure out in the near future how to continue this new series with another young researchers forum.

Tomorrow, the GI-Days 2007 - Young Researchers Forum will start in Münster, Germany. Since the people behind GISBlog are also among the people behind this year’s GI-Days conference, we will blog here about interesting news from the conference now and then.

This was originally intendend to be a live blog from the ongoing OGC TC Meeting in Paris, but live blogging relies on an internet connection. And as usual on conferences, wireless has been promised but fails in the moment it is needed. Anyway, I managed to get online somehow.

This is my first TC Meeting, and my collegues warned me before. The discussions will be exhausting they said, and they will argue about every word in the documents. The day started with the plenary, which was interesting. There was a short review of the recent ISO Meeting in Rome, and a small discussion started about the involvment of OGC in the ISO standardization process. The commen sense here seems to be that ISO should adapt OGC standards and OGC should take care that ISO does not break the OGC standards during adaption and modification. There has alo been a major rewrite of OGC’s IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) policy. In the future OGC tries to make their standardization process more transparent by making everything available to the public. To make the process better traceable, everything is getting a bit more formalized, which means even change requests are now official OGC documents and have to follow a default procedure. Nice move, I think.

Afterwards I attended the Geosemantics WG, which was really crowded. As long as somebody uses the words “semantics” or “ontology” in his work, everyone seems to be interested and pretends to listen. That only few at OGC have an idea what adding semantics to an application could mean, is pretty sad though. The next sessions were Data Quality and Context. The latter was really weird and an interesting example how one can spent one hour of talking about absolutly nothing.

To summarize the first day, I would say that the warning of my collegue was plainly wrong. No fierce discussions, no arguments, nothing at all. I wonder how standards can be developed in such boredom

The foss4g conference, which is held this year in Victoria, is the biggest event on Open Source GI-software development. As already stated in Paul Ramsey’s blog there are 217 submissions, of which 120 presentations have to be selected for a presentation. The comittee decided to go for an open review process. Anybody can start and contribute to the review process, by submitting his/her e-mail address and select the most appropriate proposals for a presentation. The open review has been started on the weekend and I am really excited, which presentations will be selected. Let’s see if there will be finally some surprises.

JTS and GEOS are the backbone of most Open Source GIS applications. JTS is a java-based API implementing the Simple Features Specification and providing a lot of feature analysis tools. GEOS is the geometry engine for the PostGIS database. So a review of the history of such prominent pieces of GI-libraries is really worthy to read, especially if it is written by one of the key persons of these projects (Martin Davis).

Actually it is interesting to see, that developing GEOS was more a hassle than expected, because it really required more time to evolve. GEOS is written in C++ so all the object life cycle management had to be controlled within the code of GEOS itself and not automatically such as in JTS using Java. So one of the conclusions to me is that JTS is far more mature than GEOS and that Java is the first choice, when setting up complex algorithms for GI-applications (especially for prototyping).

For the AGILE workshop about Test-bed for geospatial web service interoperability which was held last week before the AGILE conference, I prepared with Bastian Schaeffer, MSc. student from the University of Muenster, a Web Processing Service demo. The demo client is based on udig and allows the user to integrate different remote sources (WFS & WMS), perform distributed process provided by WPS on distribute sources (WFS) and visualize the results.

52north’s Web Processing Service incubator wiki features a detailed description of the client and links a tutorial and a screencast, which demonstrates the on-the-fly integration of multiple OGC service instances (WMS, WFS) and some distributed geo-processes.

Finally I really appreciate the latest blog post of Chris Holmes from the geoserver community about the up-coming possibilities of linking 52north WPS framework with geoserver.

Geospatial semantics is an emerging research theme in the domain of geographic information systems and spatial databases. The first edition of the conference GeoS 2005, November 29-30, 2005, Mexico City, Mexico www.geosco.org/geos2005.htm was highly successful. We have received about 50 submissions, from which 15 regular and 4 short articles have been published in Volume 3799 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science. People from 14 countries and 5 continents have attended GeoS 2005. The second edition GeoS 2007 www.geosco.org aims at providing a timely 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 will bring together researchers whose expertise will address such issues as:

• Theories for geospatial semantic information
• Formal representations for geospatial data
• Models and languages for geoontologies
• Alignment and integration of geoontologies
• Integration of semantics into spatial query processing
• Similarity comparisons of spatial datasets
• Ontology-based spatial information retrieval
• Ontology-driven GIS
• Geospatial Semantic Web
• Multicultural aspects of spatial knowledge

The full call for papers can be downloaded here: [PDF]