EU, researcher and industry partners working together adding spatial dimensions to the Web in order to improve search, reuse and interlinking of data.

Nidau, December 17, 2012: GeoKnow, an EU FP7 funded project started as scheduled in December 2012. The research shall address the problem of geospatial data, in particular, the linking of such data from different domains, scalable reasoning over billions of geographic features within the Linked Data Web and the efficient crowd-sourcing and collaborative authoring of geographic information. Geographic dimension of information is normally available, but dispersed among a multiplicity of information sources such as isolated GIS (Geographic Information Systems), enterprise warehouses, web pages and often has proprietary formats such as Excel spreadsheets. The aim is to make information seeking easier by allowing exploration, editing and interlinking of heterogeneous sources with spatial dimensions. The research project will develop open source tools that will help users, companies and government organizations to expose and utilize structured geospatial information on the Web. The project addresses various stakeholders that will benefit from the research project. Use cases from supply chain management and e-commerce (travel industry) will supplement the research. For example, the aim within the supply chain use case is to provide a unified spatial view on logistics. In order to achieve this, information from RFIDS will be connected to the Data Web allowing for better observation of material flow in real-time and providing better analytics, bottleneck discovery and improved decision making.

The GeoKnow consortium will meet on January 16 and 17 for the kick-off meeting in Leipzig and the plan is to inform the community about the results using actual channels such as LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and the GeoKnow web page.

GeoKnow in a nutshell

What Bring geospatial knowledge integration to the Linked Data Web
- Billion-triple geospatial reasoning and data provenance
- Qualitative interlinking and fusing of geospatial and semantic information
- Adaptive geospatial exploration, authoring and curation

Why Unlock isolated islands of geographic information
- 80% of all data has some spatial dimension, most of it is not processable today
- Geographic data authoring with millions of users requires powerful tools

For whom Added value for the companies and the Linked Data Web community
- Cost-effective data integration for SMEs
- Enterprises can add value to their data with volunteered geographic information
- Users from travel industry will benefit from more background information

The GeoKnow consortium. Working towards the achievement of the ambitious project goal in the consortium are six partners representing four different countries. The consortium assembled leaders from industry and research that will work in the next three years on the EU funded project. The project coordinator is InfAI (Institute für Angewandte Informatik) from the University of Leipzig (Germany), Athena Research and Innovation Center (Greece), Open Link Software (United Kingdom), Unister (Germany), Brox (Germany) and Ontos (Switzerland).

Background.

Ontos AG (Ontos) is a provider and developer of semantic technologies. Ontos software solutions work on the basis of ontology and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and offers your company full control over the vast amount of daily available business data. With the help of Ontos products you can easily control, describe and evaluate complex data from documents, mails or websites your company works with every day. Founded in 2001, Ontos AG is head-quartered in Switzerland and has affiliates in Nidau (Switzerland) and Leipzig (Germany). Ontos has also close relations with research organization like University of Leipzig, especially the AKSW group and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. More about Ontos at http://www.ontos.com

More information

About the project: http://geoknow.eu

About InfAI: http://infai.org

Contact

Project coordinator: Dr Jens Lehmann (lehmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de)

PR: pr[at]geoknow.eu

Ontos is a leader in the field of semantic technologies and works close with leading universities in the field of Semantic Web.

Therefore we are proud to be a sponsor of the 9th Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) allowing researchers around the world to contribute and present their actual work. This year includes interesting topics for knowledge engineering, use cases, LOD for eGovernment and research from the field of Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

Ontos and his partners University of Leipzig, W3C, HSE and AviComp have been awarded in Russia to a research project related to Linked Open Data and scientific papers. The research is funded by the Russian ministry and the projects run time is 600 days. Research areas cover topics like publishing aggregated content into a RDF store that is interlinked with the LOD cloud, enhanced performance and scalability of RDF store (e.g. quad store), aggregation and information extraction using new methods if rule based and statistical based text mining, API interfaces and SPARQL access to the data sets.

The European Semantic Technology conference moves into the 4th edition. Besides interesting key notes one of the main topics is LOD (Linked Open Data). LOD starts to play a major role, especially in the online publishing industry. Daniel Hladky from Ontos will participate at the LOD panel on December 3rd and will share the experiences made with LOD within customer projects. The panel will start at 2 pm CET and is moderated by John Davies. More details about the event can be found under http://www.estc2010.com.