Two more days until this year’s GIScience conference starts - for the first time in Europe, here in Münster. Since some (maybe even all) of this blog’s authors are going to be there, you can expect lots of news from the world of geographic information science on gisblog.net during the next few days.
Just a short notice, at Thursday some talks of the foss4g conference will be accessible as live streams. For more information visit the Foss4g2006 website. Enjoy!
For those of you dealing with semantic interoperability in the geospatial domain, similarity measurement is certainly one of the most important research topics. The Similarity-Blog provides interesting thoughts and ideas plus a pretty comprehensive overview of literature in that field (most of the references with direct links to the PDFs), so it is definitely worth a look. Unfortunately, most of the stuff my colleage Jano collected in the previous version of the blog got lost when his blogger-account was hacked. He had to start from zero again, now using WordPress on his own server, and contiously puts up the old post little by little.
The working group of Prof. Krüger here at ifgi has a great demo movie for their technology for mobile map interaction. The basic idea is to use a mobile device with a camera which scans a classic paper map. On the display of the device, additional information is then projected on this scanned image, such as personally tagged locations.
For further information, please refer to this abstract or the paper The Maurauders Lens.
Ok, it is summer, but someone (Mateusz Łoskot) is just preparing himself for the upcoming OpenSource conference Foss4G in September in Lausanne, Switzerland and initiated an IRC channel for the conference. The IRC log of this channel does not yet include interesting content, but this could change during the conference. Also some blogging will be going on, because the conference will provide wireless internet access. Watch out and enjoy the summer!
The Joint Research Centre run by the European Comission is launching the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (IJSDIR). The refereed journal will be published free of charge and exclusively on the web. All articles will be published under Create Commons licenses. As the title implies, the journal focuses on papers dealing with SDI technology, methods, applications, impacts and policies (for details, have a look at the call for articles).
Yesterday was the application deadline for this years’ Google Summer Of Code. Two fellow students and me decided to take part with the idea of a plugin for uDig. Map annotation is already a big topic here in this blog. Carsten wrote his thesis about argumentation maps, which brings this issue even a step further. The suggested plugin should not only allow for annotating map features with additional information, but also enable user to argue about features in a chat-like discussion. They should be able to suggest modifications and broadcast specific map views to clarify certain aspects of the ongoing argumentation. The communication between the participants is built on top of the jabber protocol. For the map annotations we want to implement the already stated OGC XIMA specification. I am really curious about the reaction of the people at Google and Refractions. And I am eager to here about your comments and (hopefully) suggestions.
Go here to read our application and tell us if our plans are feasible (or just too ambitious) 
Just a short post. I discovered that the list of accepted full papers for the GiScience in Muenster in September is online. Have a look:
EE Times reports on the latest activities in Microsoft’s research labs in the context of Virtual Earth. They are currently working on a technology called Sense Web, which is planned to be included in Virtual Earth within the next few months. What Sense Web does is basically the integration of live data gathered from different kinds of sensors. That can be anything measurable from air quality to traffic density data - or whatever comes to a developers mind.
To some of you, this certainly sounds familiar. Sense Web seems to become a Mircosoft version of the OGC SensorWeb. Although there is no information around on the architecture of Sense Web yet, I doubt it will be using OGC standards - which would actually be a great thing. I am pretty sure it would boost the develoment and the popularity of the OGC’s efforts in this field.
However, if Mircosoft could really launch this feature within the next months, it would certainly present the use of Sensors in web based mapping applications to a big new audience that is not aware of these possibilities yet. Which might in turn raise attention for the OGC Sensor Web, whether Microsoft will be using it or not.
Via All Points Blog.
Some posts ago Carsten was wondering about the missing proposals for a standardized way for map annotations. Here is a suggestion to utilize ontologies to add these annotations. Sounds like a great idea, Ontologies (written in OWL in this case) do not constrain you to specific properties. If you like, you are able to enrich the annotations by adding new concepts. Sure, this goes even more away from the idea of fixed standard, but on the other hand we would have a standardized way to access and to reason with the available annotations.
One bad thing though is the rather complicated (and not intuitive) way to work with these ontologies. GeoMarkup looks like a promising approach with its integration into JUMP. But the screenshots still show the xml code used in OWL. In my opinion tools which use ontologies (and the according languages) should try to hide this fact from the user. Machines might like to read RDF, I definitly not.
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