PROGRAM 

MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2005 (FIRST FLOOR HALL, IN FRONT OF THE MULTIPLE USE ROOM)

18:00-20:00            Registration, Ice Break, and Exhibitions’ Opening

TUESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2005 (MULTIPLE USE ROOM)

7:00-9:00                Registration

9:00-9:30             Opening Ceremony

9:30-10:30           Keynote “Interoperability among Geospatial Ontologies” by Jerry Hobbs, ISI, USA

10:30-11:00            Coffee Break

11:00-12:45         Session 1 (Theories for Geospatial Semantic Information: Chair – M. Egenhofer)

11:00-11:30            Comparing Representations of Geographic Knowledge Expressed as Conceptual Graphs

Athanasios Karalopoulos, Margarita Kokla, and Marinos Kavouras (Greece)

11:30-12:00            Ontology Ontegeny: Understanding how an Ontology is Created and Developed

Hayley Mizen, Catherine Dolbear, and Glen Hart (United Kingdom)

12:00-12:30            Representing the Meaning of Spatial Behavior by Spatially Grounded Intentional Systems

Christoph Schlieder (Germany)

12:30-12:45            An Interstage Change Model for Sandbox Geography

Florian A. Twaroch (Austria)

12:45-15:00         Lunch

15:00-17:00         Session 4 (Ontology-based Spatial Information Retrieval: Chair – I. Cruz)

15:00-15:15            Purpose-Driven Navigation

Neeharika Adabala and Kentaro Toyama (India)

15:15-15:45            Extending Semantic Similarity Measurement with Thematic Roles

Krzysztof Janowicz (Germany)

15:45-16:00            Coffee Break

16:00-16:30            Exploiting Geospatial Markers to Explore and Resocialize Localized Documents Christophe Marquesuzaa, Patrick Etcheverry, and Julien Lesbegueries (France)

16:30-17:00            Ontology Matching for Spatial Data Retrieval from Internet Portals

Hartwig H. Hochmair (United States)

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

KEYNOTE

INTEROPERABILITY AMONG GEOSPATIAL ONTOLOGIES

Jerry R. Hobbs

USC Information Sciences Institute
Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA

ABSTRACT. One way to achieve interoperability among diverse resources in any domain is to construct an "inter-theory" into and out of which the basic constructs of each resource can be translated. One can, for example, translate a query formulated in the framework of resource A into the inter-theory, translate that into the language of resource B to exploit its special strengths in answering the query, and translate the answer back into the language of resource A.

Because the perspectives of various resources can be very different, the inter-theory should be a careful, broad explication of the basic concepts of the domain making as few theory-laden commitments as possible and isolating those it needs to make. At the same time, it should focus primarily on the basic concepts, leaving treatment of more specialized areas to individual resources. For example, an ontology for geospatial interoperability should interface with a resource on the shapes of geographical regions, but not encode its internal representations.

In this talk I will describe a fledgling effort to develop a common ontology for expressing and reasoning about spatial information for the Semantic Web, that was begun as part of the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program. The aim of this ontology is to provide a way for different spatial reasoning engines and spatial resources to communicate with each other, as well as a way for people to mark up the spatial information on their web sites. The goals of the effort are to produce an ontology that will

1. Enable general, though not necessarily efficient, reasoning about spatial concepts.

2. Link with more efficient specialized reasoning engines for spatial reasoning.

3. Link with the numerous databases that exist containing a wealth of specific, e.g., geographical, spatial information.

4. Support convenient query capabilities for spatial information.

The classes of concepts that should be covered in such an ontology include topological relations (e.g., RCC8), dimension, orientation, shape, measures like length, area and volume, latitude, longitude and elevation, and abstract notions of political subdivision. I will focus in particular on topological relations. In addition, the inter-theory should be amenable to treatments of uncertainty and granularity. For example, concerning the latter, we can view a city as a 0-dimensional point, a 2-dimensional region, and a 3-dimensional volume, and these need to be compatible viewpoints within the inter-theory.

I will also draw lessons from two more mature efforts to construct inter-theories in the domains of time and of the structure of events and processes.

SPEAKER'S BIO. Dr. Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. He earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science. He has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York. From 1977 to 2002 he was with the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was a principal scientist and program director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He is the author of the book "Literature and Cognition", and was also editor of the book "Formal Theories of the Commonsense World". He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state automata. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as senior computer scientist and research professor at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

Conference Proceedings is now available online LNCS 3799 GeoSpatial Semantics: First International Conference, GeoS 2005, Mexico City, Mexico, November 29-30, 2005. Editors: M. Andrea Rodríguez, Isabel F. Cruz, Sergei Levashkin, Max J. Egenhofer

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM

Download Program in pdf (121K), Program Overview in pdf (115K), and a guide to the banquet site, restaurant "La Casa de Cantera" in pdf (131K).