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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]

I got around this question about REST and OGC Services, while writing a paper. And I am still struggeling in two ways with the question. First way, are my conclusions right and second, is this really a relevant question?
But first a short introduction. The term REST stands for Representation State Transfer and was coined in the phd thesis of Fielding. REST in my view proposes principles about web-based software architecture design (a.k.a. architectural styles). It does not give guidelines, but extracts certain properties (called constraints), which should be inherited from these REST-ful components (such as Web Services). These properties reflect also the basic concepts of the Web. So a REST-ful web service has to be:

• stateless
• talking over HTTP (POST and/or GET)
• Using URLs

Even these properties are somehow applied on a web service technology view. Most of the articles on the Web somehow do forget about that. So for instance assuming, that REST is XML based or is on the same stage as SOAP, is not the case. However it can be compared to SOAP/WSDL, if you want to compare them on a level of fine-grain web architecture design. Doing so, it becomes clear that, REST seems to be sufficient in most of the projects and it only has to be extended, if real enterprise applications have to be bring to the market (and then use SOAP/WSDL).
Ok, so far, that is theory. Now back to the question. If I only look at the specifications of OGC Services I would definitely say that OGC Services (as WMS, WFS, WCS) are actually fulfilling these REST-properties. But you barely find any evidence, that OGC Services are REST-ful. A recent post at the Surveying, Mapping and GIS blog links somehow REST and OGC, but does not identify a clear link, between the both.
Regarding the second question, I would say, that the question is relevant, to assess the development stage of such a specification. You can clearly see, that OGC pushes their specifications towards SOAP/WSDL if they are mature enough (e.g. WMS). Additionally it shows, that OGC’s specification process (at least the results) are quite software driven and always attached to a real implementation scenario.

Sven and me are working in an European-funded project called SWING. The acronym stands for Semantic Web services Interoperability for Geospatial decision making, which requires a good bit of imagination. Actually, the acronym derives from the song It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) by Duke Ellington, which makes more sense in my opinion. The major downside of the term SWING is its abundance. First of all, we have a form of jazz music called Swing. This alone shouldn’t be a problem (and makes it actually more interesting), swing in combination with the term project should be sufficient to locate its website. But there’s this small, unimportant other swing project out there, introduced by a small company which brought us also the programming language named after an island famous for its coffee. Having Swing, the GUI toolkit for Java, the dance, and lots of other projects/institutions with the SWING acronym makes it nearly impossible to achieve a fair ranking in search machines. But we are computer scientists and know about the PageRanking algorithm. So, for finishing my explanations about the name SWING, I conclude with the only reason for writing this little text: a link to the project website.

A look at the proceedings of the most important conferences in geographic information science reveals the disappearence of a topic that has been at the core of our discipline from the first day: GIS. Apparently, we either know everything about GIS, or researchers simply got bored with the topic and turned to other, more interesting research areas (I think the truth is somewhere in between).
Of course, there are still other important topics within the broader field, such as wayfinding/routing and data integration/interoperability. But in my opinion, those topics will face the same destiny - the most relevant research questions will be solved, and the solutions will be put into practice by the industry. Which brings up the question of what will be the future research topics we are going to tackle - or, to put it more drastically: will there still be a right to exist for GI science as an independent discipline?
The current hot research topics in our field suggest that the per-definition interdisciplinary GI science community will become even more interdisciplinary. We do no longer stick to the core topic of computing spatial information, but we are taking disciplines such as cognitive science (spatial cognition), AI (spatial reasoning), and - of course - ideas of Web 2.0 (trust networks) into account. From a political perspective, the need for research on privacy becomes more and more pressing. Beyond those current topics, there is still a significant amount of research done on very basic topics, and I do not think that we will run out of such topics in the near future.
With the current state of GI science in mind, I do believe that it will continue to be an independent discipline. It will certainly get even more interdisciplinary - there are still topics which could be seen as obviously related to the field, but which have not been addressed from a GI perspective yet, such as logistics (as far as I know).

Just a few thoughts on the future of our research. I am looking forward to comments!

This post is an interesting read. The writer argues that reputation in science is taken far too important nowadays. Grants, for example, depend not only on the quality of the submission, but also on the reputation of the submitting scientists. Her proposal is to get rid of names in the papers and applications and let the content and quality of the research work speak for itself. What do you think?

For the GI Days 2007 here at the IFGI I am responsible for providing a platform which supports the always important networking between the participants. This is actually nothing you would normally care about: socialising happens by itself, and you can’t really force someone into it. The only thing you can do is providing the tools to make it easier to sustain the evolved relationships. 

Social networks as one of the key technologies of the so called ”web 2.0″  make all these networking aspects suddenly a crucial aspect for the success of conferences. This year’s ACM SIGIR for example includes a Doctoral Consortium which gives “students an opportunity to establish a supportive community of other doctoral students at the same stage of their dissertation research as themselves. “

Actually research has always been consisting of two tasks: doing your research and identify relevant people to get feedback. Social networks and networking is just another term for this old concept, new is only the fuss everyone seems to make about it.

As it can be read in the article about this year’s Foss4G in the joint newsletter of the OSGeo Foundation and the Grass GIS team, the next Foss4g (Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics) in 2007 will be held in Victoria Canada from 24-27 September. Foss4g is the former MapServer User Conference and turned out to be the biggest conference about OpenSource in the GI-domain.

Brent Owens of openplans.org announced on the geoserver mailing list the new geoserver blog. The blog will cover all geoserver related stuff as announcements, tutorials, tips and developer notes. This blog is meant for people, who cannot follow all mailing list discussions.

For those of you in or around Münster in Germany: We will have a special guest at our GI Forum talk series tomorrow, Sara Fabrikant from the University of Zürich. Her talk is entitled Looking through static and dynamic geovisualization displays and will be held at the Institute for Geoinformatics, Robert-Koch-Str. 26-28, 48149 Münster in room 72 and start at 4:15pm (tuesday, december 5).

Abstract:

In this lecture I present an empirical evaluation framework based on the eye movement data collection method to investigate the relationship of thematic relevance and perceptual salience in static e.g., visual variables: color hue, color value and orientation) and animated (e.g., dynamic variables including transitions) map displays. In controlled experiments we currently investigate how novices’ viewing patterns are modified when thematically relevant items are made perceptually more salient through design. In essence, we are asking if perceptually salient elements draw novice viewers’ attention to thematically relevant information, whether or not users have domain knowledge.

Results collected thus far suggest that display design (i.e., saliency) does influence viewing behavior and inference making, whether participants have prior knowledge or not (i.e., training). With the collected empirical evidence we hope to provide better understanding of how people extract relevant information from static and dynamic maps, and how people make inferences from these map displays for knowledge
construction of dynamic geographic processes.