W3C SWAD-Europe

SWAD-Europe Workshop on representing geographic information in the semantic Web, 4 and 5 October 2004, Budapest, Hungary.

Agenda | Location | Registration | Minutes | Suggested Readings | Logistics

Nearby: SWAD-Europe events page

This workshop is being run by the SWAD-Europe project . The primary goals of the workshop are to:

  1. Bring together developers working on the use of geographic data in the semantic web.
  2. Provide a brief survey of available tools, development projects, and areas where further development would be useful.

Agenda

Please note that this workshop will be conducted entirely in English.

Provisional agenda

A more detailed agenda will be made available at the beginning of October.

Monday, 4 October: 09h30 - 13h00
Setting up, Introductions
Participants are asked to take a few minutes to introduce themselves and explain the work they are doing or have done in this area, and their interests
Problems
Identifying things which are currently difficult or apparently not possible.
Existing tools
Gather information on existing tools in production use, that are directly applicable to or could be applied to the problems described. What do people do by hand, because it is easier?
Lunch, 13h00
To be provided
Afternoon, 14h00 - 17h00
Working examples
Work in Progress, demonstrations, approaches being used or tried.
Vocabularies
Are there a lot of different vocabularies interacting, or is there readily emerging consensus?
Dinner
Progos, our hosts, have arranged for their annual garden party to coincide with the workshop - so this will be the formal workshop social event.
Tuesday 5 October: 09h30 - 13h00
RSS and HTML
How far is it feasible to implement solutions that allow for people using simple tools (blogs, wikis and web-based HTML authoring tools for example) to incorporate interoperable geospatial information in what they publish.
Review
Look at list of problems, vocabularies, tools, see if there are others we want to tackle. Are there things we didn't think of yesterday? Does a wider perspective on the problem suggest more solutions, or more problems?
Different names for the same place - scope, range and variety
Are these seperate problems? Or are they manifestations of a complex question whose solutions can be best found by looking for the common threads?
Lunch 13h00
Again
Afternoon 14h00 - 16h30
Emerging topics
What have we recognised as important topics for discussion?
Development priorities
What are people actually working on after this meeting? What is missing from the available tools, or is more important than current development efforts seem to recognise?
Conclusions and closing
Wrapping up - what we can expect to see from the workshop, what follow up is useful?

Location

 Progos.hu are handling the organisation of the workshop locally in Budapest (as well as taking part).

Kép az épületrőlThe workshop will be at the Hungary W3C Office, which is hosted by Sztaki, the Computer Science department of the Hungarian Academy of Science. The address is

1111 Budapest XI. Lágymányosi u. 11

and the Hungarian Office contact page (in hungarian) includes pictures of where exactly the offices are (3rd floor in the building)

Registration

Registration is free and open to the public, but required. Participants must register before the 1st of October, using W3C's online registration.

Note: In order to use this system, you need a W3C site password - if you are an employee of a W3C member organisation you are likely to have one already, or can apply for one. Members of the public can get a public access password online

According to the privacy policy for the access password, your information will not be passed to anyone.

Numbers will be limited, and no places can be guaranteed for people who have not registered. In general registration will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Participants are expected to provide a brief note (100 - 500 words) about their relevant work and interest, and to attend both days of the workshop. Participation in the workshop is free of charge, and coffee / lunch will be provided, but participants must pay their own expenses (transport, accommodation, etc).

Minutes

A report of the workshop with links to more detailed records of the discussion will be made available to the public after the workshop.

Preparation - readings

This list of readings will be updated in late September and again shortly before the workshop.

Tools

DAML.org airport lookup
A service that returns RDF data about an airport, including its location, given is IATA or ICAO code - for example http://www.daml.org/cgi-bin/airport?BUD
RDF pointer
A tool in SVG / javascript, designed to provide graphic user interfaces for representing and producing geospatial information in RDF. Under development as an open-source project at W3C.
Nearest Airport
A simple tool from Morten Frederiksen that gives information about the nearest airport given a latitude and longitude, or returns information about an airport given its IATA code.

Projects

ASDI
Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure is a framework for linking users and providers of spatial information.
Dublin Core Metadata Intiative (DCMI)
The Dublin Core is probably the most widely-known metadata schema, and one of its recommendations is the Point Encoding Scheme (designed for plain text / XML). Like most schemes it includes the possiblity of using latitude/longitude references. This vocabulary has been specified as an RSS 1.0 spatial module
ESW GeoInfo wiki
A wiki page that attempts to collect information on Geographic information in RDF. As well as a number of useful links to sources of geographic datasets and other relevant work, it describes the WGS84 lat/long/alt vocabulary (an RDF Schema is also available). See also the GeoOnion page about a vocabulary for describing the size of a named place, or the height geo-extension for describing the height of a place in terms of easily understood concepts (first floor above or below ground, etc.)
Geosemantics Interest Group Web Portal
A collection of useful information including ontologies describing geographic information, problems and people working on them, etc.
OpenGeospatialConsortium
The OGC is an international consortium working on development of standards for the exchange of geospatial information (the OpenGIS specifications).
PhotoRSS
A project working on attaching location data to photographs, for RSS feeds or Webpages.
Space.frot
A collection of work by Jo Walsh on representing geographic information in RDF

Position papers

Logistics

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Charles McCathieNevile. I will try to answer as fast as possible - email is generally the most effective channel.

A very good collection of information for visitors to Budapest is available from Sztaki, including links to maps, taxi companies, information on getting from the airport and getting around, etc.

Transportation

Budapest has an international airport with flights from many cities in Europe. Budget airlines offering flights to BudaPest include Easyjet. There are also trains and buses.

Money

Hungary uses the Forint (HUF). As of 16 September 1 euro was worth around 250 Forint.

Accommodation

Some suggestions are here - there are a number of others available via the internet - try Hungarian Hotel Guide or Budapest Tourism Links:

Some hotels
Name Type Approx. price

(room/night)

Notes...
Schönherz Student Hostel 20€(7€/head/night)
  • Cheapest
  • 10 minutes walk from workshop
Marco Polo Motel 30-40€
Sunlight Hotel 40-50€
  • 10 minutes walk from Progos
  • great city panorama from the top of a hill
Ventura Hotel 60€
  • 3km from Sztaki (direct tram connection)
Flamenco Hotel 100€
  • 10 minutes walk from Workshop
  • lakeside location
Marriott Hotel 200€
  • City heart riverside location
  • great city heart panorama

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Charles McCathieNevile

Last modified $Date: 2004/09/29 14:03:21 $