SocopMeetingpage/SocopMeetingpage 2010 06 30

SOCoP Meeting Minutes from Wednesday June 30, 2010 from 11:00 - 12:00 EDT

Attendees / Participants John Moeller (NG), John Clark (NGA), Gary Berg-Cross(Knowledge Strategies), Laura Reece (TASC), Dave Kolas (BBN Technologies), Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin ) Mike Dean (BBN Technologies) Following introductions the following were discussed:

1. Update on USGS integrated National Map (TNM) data. Although Dalia could not attend she sent an email to indicate that data is not yet available for use in the demo. Eric Wolf has moved to a different assignment so they have experienced a short gap in their efforts. They now have a new student programmer assigned and expect progress by August.

Following the meting, Lynn Usery added the following update:

We have a server (ybother.usgs.gov) that we have configured for access by those outside USGS. We have initial conversions of some NHD data to N3 format, with the coordinate information stored in GML. I am now working with this effort directly and as soon as I can verify the success of the conversion, I will make the data available to you. We are working on further conversions to RDF and as this work progresses, we will make them available on the same server.

Bottomline, I hope to provide you access to the server and the converted data in the next few days. We will continue to convert data with the objective of having all vector data (hydrography, transportation, and boundaries) in our research test datasets (6 subwatersheds, 3 urban areas) available by Sept 30, 2010. I am working on conversion of the raster data (elevation, land cover, images), but we are developing methods for extracting features from these data and building the semantics around the features.

2. Workplan for 2010 had 3 sub-topics: a. Update on the Demo. Todd Pehle could not make the meeting but provided the following update to Gary:

Todd preferred to wait until August to do an actual demo for the monthly meeting in the hope of having more stable software (and services) by that point. He plans on working diligently in July to get a few data sources AND services stood up. Todd plans on working with USGS towards the following goals:

1) Get at least some USGS data stood up as a SPARQL endpoint (hopefully via USGS servers) 2) Stand up a very simple "same-Place-As" service that, in the likeness of sameAs.org, will store assertions that a geofeature is owl:sameAs another geofeature. Open Street Map did a partial import of USGS topographic features recently. Thus, there are at least some USGS features that are owl:sameAs Open Street Map features. The idea is that this would be a simple place to start the interlinking of geo datasets.

3) Stand up the Marbles GUI service that was demoed earlier at USGIF Tech Days. This would allow a user to search only USGS data (which kind of defeats purpose of 'linked' data) or a user would also be able to search 'across' linked geo datasets over a given area. The Marbles service would query across dbpedia, sindice, etc., but will also query the Socop- same-Place-As' and USGS services.

Todd is hoping USGS can stand up 1) while he stand up 2) and 3) say by August. By August he should be able to demonstrate locally (on laptop) at least. By September we should look to have this implemented on the web. Todd plans on giving demo at GIScience Linked Spatiotemporal Data workshop in September, so September is his final due date.

b. The OGC GeoSemantics Meeting John noted that several meeting participants has attended the June GeoSemantics workshop and seen the demo. John asked for Impressions and comments on the demo.

John Clark noted that in Federal circles one needs to demonstrate a better bottom line. He thought that currently the value proposition for ontologies is still hostage to the theoretical and  that the community needs to show the value added of ontologies. This would include: reduction in speed, added precision, whether we can do something new, or reduce errors, etc.

c. Plans for the Fall workshop. Johns thinking was to have the workshop on the 1st or 2nd week of Nov. But Mike pointed out that there is a conflict with ISWC conference (the week of Nov 8).

An alternative approach, which the group liked, was to have the SOCoP Workshop held in late October in conjunction with the Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense and Security (STIDS) Conference to be held at George Mason University at the C4I center (W-F Oct 27th -29th). So we might try to do it the day earlier on the 26th. And MITRE isnt that far.

John Clark took an action to check who is doing semantics work at GMU (Fairfax or Greenbelt).

Gary took an action to contact Leo Obrst who is on the Program Committee and he relayed the proposal to Paulo Costa and Kathy Laskey who are co-chairs. Following the meeting he heard back from Paulo Cesar G Costa, Research Assistant Professor at the C4I Center / SEOR Department, who liked the idea of having the SOCoP workshop as a pre-conf workshop but there was an issue of how to fine-tune the logistics.

One thing is other workshops pre-conf tutorials (e.g. ISWC's URSW). People attending that workshop will also have to attend the conference. The conference is a 3-day (1-day tutorial/workshops + 2-days conference) package that includes the brand new Mason Inn venue, parking, as well as the administrative support (including website-based registration) from Events Management.

The tutorial or tutorials are still to be decided upon (i.e. they will happen, but they need to define what and who), so they have room to avoid a tutorial/workshop that conflicts with SOCoP. In summary they think that their much larger scope and audience does help in making it attractive to the SOCoP attendees.

As of July 5 Paolo though the following 2 options seemed the most appropriate to consider:

1) No commitment to STIDS (but held at the Johnson Center) In this case, workshop attendees don't need to register to the conference. We would still advertise the workshop at the STIDS website and provide you with a room in the Johnson Center (also the Mason Inn charges us $85 per person per day). However, we cannot offer A/V support, parking, food, and access to the conference services and facilities, since all have a cost attached.

2) Commitment to STIDS In this case, workshop attendees need to register to the conference and pay $25 to attend the workshop. In addition to the room we would provide A / V support, parking, food and access to the conference services and facilities. This includes the logistical support for charging the registration. The $25 fee would mostly help to cover part of the food and logistic support (badges, posters, parking), while the remaining would be absorbed by the conference fee. Also, charging something would prevent people to register to the workshop (it's free anyway) and don't show up.

Paulo said that he would be happy to support either option if you're interested. His suggestion is to assess the level of overlapping between the workshop and STIDS. If most of the attendees would go to STIDS anyway then option 2 is a plus. Else, we can stick with option 1.

He noted that they are doing their best to keep the registration fee as low as possible since some of our attendees are very tight on budget.

On possible topics for the Fall workshop John suggested 4-5topic area from GeoSemantics Summit. 1. GeoSparQL (Xavier) 2. Demo 3. Reference Model 4. Best Practice examples  NGA, Batemen etc. 5. Value Proposition

John Clark asked if there was any work with RPI on Open Data and Data.gov annotated with RDF? The underlying thought was that the inclusion of data which had been converted to RDF would be good and could help with furthering semantic capabilities. No one was sure how far conversion had gone with RDF, but we should check with Doug Niebert, Mark De Mulder or John Goodwin involved from UK. John will ask.

Paper for STIDS Mike also raised the idea of SOCoP submitting something for STIDS, say a demo. There is an Aug. 17 deadline. Mike thinks it would be well received. 8 Page papers are suggested.

After some discussion Mike and Dave volunteered to help get this started. John suggesting pulling together something from the community to increase the awareness of SOCoP. Leveraging Todd and Joshs work was one another thing to consider.

Nancy volunteered that she has an undergraduate student, who might help with RDF data etc. Nancy had previously talked to Todd about the student helping with the demo.

When asked if NGA is doing anything for conference, John said that he wasnt sure  maybe a poster.

3. Briefing on 13th Annual Open Forum on Metadata Laura Reece briefed the group on happenings from 13th Annual Open Forum on Metadata: Emerging Semantic Technology Standardsmaking life easier in the information world. She noted that not all talks were semantically oriented but some are.

The theme of the 13th Open Forum was semantic technology standards and their application in real-world environments. The program was populated with practitioners utilizing semantic technologies and standards for them in their applications as well as standards developers. The overall purpose of this forum is to foster discussion on the implementation of standards and recommendations for future work. Nineteen presentations were provided by academia, industry, and government. Highlighted from Open Forum what she thought was of interest  ex JPL, Baba Piprani on Closing the Loop---Services, Processes, and Semantics a reality check.

Lots of work from China and Korea were relevant. You can use the links on the site to see the presentations and papers. Laura noted that the co-conference out of ISO/IEC JTC1/  Data Management and Interchange work drafted a resolution to SC32 focused on web services SOA, Cloud computing.

There was also actions items on Liaison and study group on ontology in the Cloud era in China Aug 26-29 at Wu-Han University. Several people setting it up (Including people at GMU). Topics include Semantic Interoperability, future of MDR standards, service registries, what happening with all these standards etc.

4. NSF grant Nancy indicated that there was on no news on our grant  it is still under review. Follow up on what In response to a question from gary on other NSF grant possibilities Nancy suggested the following:

NSF CISE Information and Intelligent Systems has medium projects due Sept. 1-15, large Nov. 1-28, and small Dec. 1-17.


 * Small Projects - up to $500,000 total budget with durations up to three years;


 * Medium Projects - $500,001 to $1,200,000 total budget with durations up to four years; and


 * Large Projects - $1,200,001 to $3,000,000 total budget with durations up to five years.

The question is would we submit something new or just modify our existing proposal and if so how?

5. OOR work Gary noted that he had submitted several Ordinance Survey ontologies to the OOR and gotten some error messages. He will send Mike a copy of one. (2F1P)

The following is a Summary of Action Items: 1. Demo weave in value proposition  Mike and Dave will look into it 2. Laura on SC32/38 status 3. Nancy on NSF and help from intern 4. Mike and Dave for submission for STIDS 5. Gary follow up with Leo / Paulo on 26th workshop and solicit ideas for agenda topics 6. John follow up on data.gov 7. John Clark follow up with GMU folks. 8. Gary will send errors on OOR to Mike.

The next planned meting is Wed. July 21, 2010.