Roy Grønmo (2010). Can Graph Transformation Make Aspect Languages for BPEL Redundant? In Proceedings of 14th IEEE International EDOC Conference, Vitória, Brazil.

“This European initiative will provide Europeans with information that can be used to further improve their quality of life through a better knowledge of the living environment, delivering the necessary information to fight climate change, respond to emergencies, and alert citizens if air quality gets bad, to cite a few examples. Recently, GMES has also been used to help rescue operations in Haiti and fight the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The European Parliament has taken an important step in the legislative process”, said Vice-President Antonio Tajani. (link)

With its approval  by the European Parliament, the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security)  initiative has take an important step.

The approval of the Parliament gave green light to the development of the GMES system by 2014, which would enable the EU to collect its own data – most of which currently comes from American satellites. The adopted regulation contains a provision for open and free of charge access to the collected data, so that all local, regional and national players can use these data to respond to natural disasters, to monitor climate change as well as to take better decisions on agriculture, forestry, energy, urban development, infrastructure or transport. The open access should also boost a “downstream market” for which small and medium-sized software companies can develop new applications.  (link)

This is great news for ENVISION and all other FP7 research projects which focus on applications for earth observation data.

The second publication titled “Using Semantic Annotation for Knowledge Extraction from Geographically Distributed and Heterogeneous Sensor Data” (A. Moraru, C. Fortuna, D. Mladenić) will be presented July 25th at the 4th International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data“, co-located with the Conference  on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

All implementations within the Envision project will be open sourced, a full release of the environmental modelling suite is scheduled for project month 12 (which is December this year). Until then, we are going to use Kenai as host for our source code repositories, documentation, and issue tracking. The wiki already contains a few guides for setting up the development environment for creating portlets for Liferay, and how to enable commication between portlets using Spring and DWR (with reverse ajax).

For next few weeks we are continuing our work on small side project to understand how to implement portlets (and agree on best practices how to approach them).

The ENVISION (environmental services infrastructure with ontologies) project aims to support environmental modeling experts to migrate their computer models into the Web. With envision, it will be possible to create portals which support decision makers to execute and visualize computer models. New environmental models will be created by coupling standards-compliant Web services into compositions. Portal components for the semantic annotation and discovery of Web services, the composition of workflows, and the visualization of model results will be developed. Creating custom portals is then a matter of selecting appropriate modules from the library. The envision project runs until December 2012.

We are looking for graduates (MSc level or equivalent) with a strong background in geoinformatics or computer science. Good communication and writing skills in English are essential. Excellent Java programing skills are mandatory. Candidates should be interested and have some knowledge in one or more of the following topics: Geospatial Semantics, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Environmental Modelling, Data Mining, or Geographic Information Retrieval, Web services, or Human-Computer Interaction.

If you are

• looking for an intellectual challenge and like to learn,
• have project experience and enjoy working in a team,
• want to apply and improve your coding skills in an international setting

then please send us a message (pajoma@uni-muenster.de)

Whilst the Web has changed with the advent of the Social Web from mostly authoritative towards increasing amounts of user generated content, it is essentially still about linked documents. These documents provide structure and context for the described data and easy their interpretation. In contrast, the upcoming Data Web is about linking data, not documents. Such data sets are not bound to a specific document but can be easily combined and used outside of the original context. With a growth rate of millions of new facts encoded as RDF-triples per month, the Linked Data cloud allows users to answer complex queries spanning multiple sources. Due to the uncoupling of data from its original creation context, semantic interoperability, identity resolution, and ontologies are central methodologies to ensure consistency and meaningful results. Space and time are fundamental ordering relations to structure such data and provide an implicit context for their interpretation. Prominent geo-related Linked Data hubs include Geonames.org as well as the Linked Geo Data project which provides a RDF serialization of Open Street Map. Furthermore, myriad other Linked Data sources contain location-based references. This workshop aims at introducing the GIScience audience to the Linked Data Web and discuss the relation between the upcoming Linked Data infrastructures and existing OGC services-based Spatial Data Infrastructures. The workshop results will directly contribute to the ongoing work of the NeoGeo Semantic Web Vocabularies Group, an online group focused on the construction of a set of lightweight geospatial ontologies for Linked Data. Overall, the workshop should help to better define the data, knowledge representations, reasoning methodologies, and additional tools needed to link locations seamlessly into the Web of Linked Data. Subsequently, with the advent of “Linked Locations” in Linked Data, the gap between the Semantic Web and the Geo Web will begin to narrow.

More information, including important dates, relevant topics, and submission procedures can be found at the workshop homepage: http://stko.psu.edu/lstd2010/