9th Summer Institute on Geographic Information Science

Venue for both weeks: The beautiful Fattoria di Maiano in Fiesole

Volunteered Geographic Information

June 5-10, 2011
Co-Facilitators: Michael Goodchild, Michael Gould, Muki Haklay, Max Craglia

Young researchers wereinvited to contemplate and discuss a wide range of VGI-related topics, including but not limited to:

• Trust: metrics of trust for individuals
• Organizational structures: moderators, editors
• Synthesis: techniques for synthesizing disparate VGI
• Issues in time-critical VGI
• Analytic techniques for data of disparate quality
• Long-term maintenence and archiving of VGI
• VGI data types: sources access, mining, etc.
• Analytical tools for very large often fuzzy data sets e.g. in respect to location and semantics
• Appropriate spatio-temporal analytical methods adapted for such data (dynamic data but often small counts making statistical analysis problematic, difficult to estimated expected rates etc.)
• Quality assessment
• Integration with traditional SDI
• Implications for research methods

PROGRAMME OVERVIEW

PRESS RELEASE on the Peter A. Burrough Award

Process Ontology

July 17-23, 2011
Co-Facilitators: Antony Galton, Michael Grueninger, David Mark, Werner Kuhn

In cooperation with the International Association for Ontology and its Applications

The topic of this week was Process Ontology and its applications to the analysis of processes in the human environment, in engineering and in business.

Goals and Contents:

Understanding processes has become one of the key challenges to society: how much does our climate change, and why? how can deforestation of the Amazon be put under control? how can manufacturing processes be optimized? Process ontology provides the theory, tools, and techniques to analyze processes and to improve the design and use of information systems that support human decisions in dynamic situations. The institute featured tutorials on ontology, progressed into research discussions and concluded with group work on the ontological analysis of processes.

Participants learned to

• apply basic ontological distinctions and formal ontology
• sort out the different kinds of things that go under the name "process"
• identify spatio-temporal patterns underlying processes
• understand implications of choosing between three- and four-dimensionalism
• relate existing process ontologies to each other
• specify complex states, processes and events in terms of simpler ones
• design domain-specific process ontologies (e.g. in manufacturing, e-commerce, geography, biology) from more generic ontologies.

PROGRAMME OVERVIEW