Current Project: DNF & Geosemantics
Summary
The UK’s Digital National Framework provides for linking business and application data to a common spatial reference. This work aims to extend the DNF, capturing and representing richer semantics in these links, building on the availability of a seamless national, spatial, digital database, marketed as OS MasterMap®, that uniquely identifies all its features using the Topographic Object ID(TOID®).
Overview
The UK leads the world in many aspects of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and this is not least through the availability of a seamless national, spatial, digital database, marketed as OS MasterMap®, that uniquely identifies all its features using the Topographic Object ID(TOID®). The core concern of the DNF is linking application objects to objects in the reference base using TOIDs. Using these identifiers, the DNF currently sets out only a very simplistic set of linking relationships between geometries. It describes 1:1, 1:n and partial equality between MasterMap features and application database objects. It allows the creation of ‘local TOIDS’ for geometries which are not available in the reference base. This work aims to extend the Framework by introducing the tools and principles of the Semantic Web. By formally describing the concepts, terms, and relationships within the reference and application datasets it is hoped that integration of the two will become simpler. It is also expected that providing a base dataset with a closer conceptual fit to a specific application or user perspective will add value and ease maintenance.
Further information
-ATH Greenhalgh, P James & D Fairbairn, 2006, "Encoding Semantics in the Digital national Framework" in Proceedings of AGILE 2006, Szekesfehervar, University of West Hungary Press, ISBN ISBN 963-229-422-X
Older things
- The Value of Standards-Based Metadata to Local Authority GI Management
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Project and papers currently in preparation
- Poster/briefing sheet [pdf]
- Building a Spatial Metadatabase for Local Authority GI Management
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Paper presented at the
GIS Research UK 2005 conference, University of Glasgow
- Abstract [pdf]
- Presentation [pdf]
- The Problems of Unique Spatial Referencing
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PhD research proposal, being carried out at Newcastle University and funded by
the
EPSRC
- Research proposal [pdf]
Commentary
- The big 'O'
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Here's the question: Just what is (an?) 'ontology' (or, for that matter
'Ontology')? For the moment I'm going to pass the buck - perhaps I'll be able
to tell you in three years time:
- The best review of ontology research I've come accross so far
- On the other hand, a bizzarely pessimistic account is available in Agarwal, P., "Ontological considerations in GIScience", International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 19(5), pp. 501-536(36)
- Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
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BoingBoingBlogger Cory Doctorow
has put together a nicely succinct overview of the some of the issues around
metadata, or rather some of the issues around people and metadata. I recognise
the frustrations coming across here well, though maybe that's because many of
the frustrations and issues he documents here apply to human users' involvement
in systems more generally.
His suggestion of moving towards a hybrid of machine-deriving and aggregating human reccomendations to form metadata is one that's gaining ground, over manually authored records (although his idea of a corporate 'vengeful info-ninja' could be usefully taken up more widely too). At the risk of throwing up just the kind of utopianism he criticises, to me this highlights the need for a universal citation and trackback mechanism, or at least one more more advanced than the document hyperlink that tools like Google rely on.
Profile
Aled Greenhalgh is a research student working on a partnership project between the School of Civil Engineering and GeoScience, University of Newcastle and Newcastle City Council. He holds degrees from the Universities of London and Newcastle.
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