eSI Public Lecture: "Adding Semantics to Geographic Data Models" by Femke Reitsma

07 April, 2009 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM

e-Science Institute, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh

Any slides or other material generated as a result of this event can be found at: www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=981

Dr Femke Reitsma Senior Lecturer Geography Department Canterbury University New Zealand The e-Science Institute is delighted to host a public lecture by Dr Femke Reitsma. The public lecture is open to all interested parties in academia and industry. There is no need to register for this event and those attending the lecture are invited to join us for tea and coffee at 17:30. This Public Lecture is scheduled to be webcast live. For further information see below.

Dr Femke Reitsma

Abstract

Meaning in geographic data sets can be found in three places: in the data set as a whole (as described by metadata), in the relationships among features in the data set (spatial or other), or in those features themselves. Most work on expressing geospatial semantics has focussed on the first two, this presentation is about the semantics to be found in individual features in a spatial data set.

Our traditional geospatial data models that allow us to represent individual features involve associating some measurable quality, such as temperature, or observable feature, such as a tree, with a point or region in space and time. When capturing data we implicitly subscribe to some kind of conceptualisation. If we can make this explicit in an ontology and associate it with the captured data, we can leverage formal semantics to reason with the concepts represented in our spatial data sets. This talk will present work on expressing semantics at the data model level and using these for discovering geospatial information, with a practical implementation as proof of concept.

Biography

Femke is a Senior Lecturer in the Geography Department at Canterbury University. She was formerly a lecturer in the School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University, director of the MScGIS programme, and affiliated with the Edinburgh Earth Observatory research group. And before that, she finished her PhD at the University of Maryland.

Mostly she likes thinking about how we represent geographic data, information and knowledge and what we do or don’t represent. Her research focuses on issues related to data, information and knowledge representation for the geosciences, and in particular for processes and dynamic models.

Webcast

This meeting was webcast live.

For the majority of the meetings that we broadcast, we keep a copy (for a limited period) and make it available from the event material page. This copy of the webcast is normally available the day after the meeting.

Related Links

http://www.femker.org/

Travel

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http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/esi_travel.html

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http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/