[OSGeo-Discuss] REGARD 2008: Call for papers & Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) to be keynote speaker !!!
Hello, Just some updates about the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality (REGARD 2008) which will be held in Quebec City on August 28-29, 2008 ... 1) Do not hesitate to propose a paper, submissions are accepted till June 9, 2008 ! 2) Tyler (Mitchell) will be one of the three keynote speakers (thanks again Tyler ! ;-)). So, open source geospatial technologies will be well represented at this event at the crossroad of mobile geospatial technologies, augmented reality, location-based games and mobile education. It will contribute to improve visibility of OSGeo in the academic and (non-geospatial) industrial domains. Come and enjoy with us at Laval University in Quebec City which celebrates its 400th birthday this year ! Th. - 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality (REGARD 2008) http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca Laval University, Quebec City (Quebec), Canada August 28-29, 2008 *Keynote speakers* We are proud to announce that Tyler Mitchell, executive director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo, http://www.osgeo.org) will be one of the three keynotes of the event! To know more about his presentation, go to http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca/2008/index.php?id=15. *Aims and scope* Augmented Reality (AR) is a means of blending computer generated objects or labels with reality so that both appear to be a part of your natural environment. AR is beginning to mature as a subject field with applications moving from pure academic research into industrial and potential consumer areas. In recent years geographic data representing real world features has increasingly been used for AR applications. In addition, geospatial technologies have established many new services and applications including navigation, decision support and modelling of the surrounding environment from which mobile AR and location-aware computing can now benefit in order to generate compelling spatiotemporal applications. The International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality aims at bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in this field. The workshop will provide a forum for original research contributions and practical experiences of mobile AR, geospatial technologies and geoinformatics, and mobile games, fostering interdisciplinary discussions in all aspects of these three fields, and will highlight future trends in this area. The workshop will be organized in a way to promote networking between the participants, to initiate and favour discussions regarding cutting-edge technologies in the field, to exchange research ideas and to promote international collaboration. *Topics of interest* We invite submissions that address theoretical, technical, and practical topics of related to mobile geospatial augmented reality. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to the following: 1. Geospatial information and geoinformatics - 3D spatial modeling - Geovisualization - Geospatial Service Oriented Architectures and systems for mobile distributed computing - Context-aware mobility and LBS - Geo-sensors and Sensor Web 2. Mobile augmented reality - Acquisition of 3D scene descriptions - Real-time and photorealistic rendering - Vision-based registration, object overlay and spatial layout techniques - Display and view management - Interaction techniques 3. Mobile games - Location based games - Spatial data integration and 3D game engine - Mobile learning and mobile edutainment - Augmented and mixed reality in mobile games - Mobile gaming experience and gaming activities *Important dates* The workshop will be held on the 28th and 29th of August 2008. Here are the important dates for the workshop: 1. Paper abstracts due June 02, 2008 2. Full papers due June 09, 2008 3. Notification of acceptance July 01, 2008 4. Registration July 15, 2008 5. Final paper version due July 15, 2008 6. Workshop August 28-29, 2008 *Instructions for authors* The proceedings are expected to be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography (LNG&C) series (see http://www.springer.com/series/7418). The decision is currently pending. Authors must submit full papers in English according to the Springer formatting guidelines (http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca/2008/UserFiles/File/instruct-authors-e.pdf). The templates (Latex or Word template) for preparing full papers can be downloaded here: - Download the Word template (http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca/2008/UserFiles/File/T1-book.zip) - Download the Latex template (http://regard.crg.ulaval.ca/2008/UserFiles/File/svmult.zip) Nevertheless, *full papers must be submitted in PDF file format*! The page limit for full papers is 12 pages. Manuscripts not submitted in the provided style or having more than 10 pages will not be reviewed and
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Should OSGeo get involved in the Information Architecture realm and nurture the development of definitive spatial ontologies?
Bruce Bannerman wrote: We need robust debate on these types of issues if we are to progress them. Ok.. let's try this :-) I see that there are two main ways of utilising spatial information: - producing a pretty picture that helps people understand an issue. We have a number of types of products that fall in this realm, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Slippy Maps etc. - as an input into structured analysis that is used as an aid to answering a particular question and also as an aid to exploring inter-relationships between spatial, business, scientific data etc. The output from this analysis could be a 'map', but of equal relevance it could be in tabular, graphical or textual form. This is the realm of traditional spatial analysis, image analysis or a range of spatial products that I like to term 'Spatial Intelligence Frameworks' e.g. Cohga's Weave, NGIS' GeoSamba, ESRI Australia's Eview. I don't think this dichotomy holds up under close scrutiny. I don't see that much difference in the cognitive processes or computing tools involved in "producing a pretty picture that helps people understand an issue" and "structured analysis as an aid to answering a particular question" or "exploring inter-relationships between ... data." Is not "structured analysis" part of producing any form of useful presentation? In general, it's HARDER to organize and present issues to an audience that is not already familiar with the intricacies of an issue. This implies that one needs more powerful tools, and more flexible data representations, to produce pretty pictures than to simply perform a specialized analysis. A specialized analysis is amenable to a specialized tool. The broader the range of analyses one wants to perform, and the broader the range of presentations that one might want to use to illustrate an issue, the MORE powerful and flexible the tools one needs - even more so if one wants to provide interactive capabilities to the audience of the "pretty picture." Tools that support breadth, depth, and flexibility, coupled with ease-of-use and a touch of elegance, are far harder to build than those that support more narrowly scoped problems. As a simple example: yes you can produce pretty pie charts using a drawing program, and you can perform incredibly powerful statistical analyses using SPSS or Mathematica, but you can address a far larger set of problems using a spreadsheet with graphics capabilities, particularly if the spreadsheet can tap into SQL databases, and you have a library of specialized macros available. Throw into this the big picture issues that we are facing, e.g. Climate Change, Water Shortage (in Australia) etc that require analysis at a continental or global scale and we have a big problem. How can we as an industry help this work to progress quickly with minimal impact on the analysis, minimal double handling of data and in many cases the use of dynamic data from multiple sources? In the end, I suspect that we will need community driven involvement to get it right. Communities of practice (like the geoscience community) will need to work together to develop *their* profiles describing *their* data. Is it an OSGeo responsibility? Probably not. I take the point of your earlier email that OSGeo is predominantly about OS software. When you consider the analysis requirement for spatial data, I suspect that we as an industry may be heading in the wrong direction. Some of the issues that are are attracting a lot of effort are about simplifying spatial data (GeoRSS, GeoJSON, BXFS etc). These appear to be about catering to the 'pretty picture' use of spatial information. I'm sort of driven to the opposite conclusion. The more that data profiles are developed by specialized communities, the less likely that different data sets will be amenable to combination and correlation to support complex, cross-discipline issues such as climate change. In one direction lies the need for anyone, working on a complicated problem, to understand in great detail all the overlapping disciplines that might be involved. In the other direction lies framing higher levels of abstraction that allow examination of different types of ordering and interactions. The example that comes to mind is systems engineering (my own discipline, as it turns out). Yes, a systems engineer has to understand quite a bit about all the disciplines involved in building a system (or these days, a system-of-systems). If you're building an aircraft, you'd better understand a lot about aeronautics, avionics (including hardware, real-time software environments, specific algorithms), and so forth. But the discipline involves understanding interactions and tradeoffs, at a higher level. It's been a long time since I've written a large program, or designed hardware - and I haven't kept up with the intricacies of today's development tools - but makin
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Should OSGeo get involved in the Information Architecture realm and nurture the development of definitive spatial ontologies?
Hi Jo, Thank you for your considered reply (...and no, I don't consider it trollish ;-) ) We need robust debate on these types of issues if we are to progress them. OK, I'll try and put some more context on the original query. I see that there are two main ways of utilising spatial information: - producing a pretty picture that helps people understand an issue. We have a number of types of products that fall in this realm, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Slippy Maps etc. - as an input into structured analysis that is used as an aid to answering a particular question and also as an aid to exploring inter-relationships between spatial, business, scientific data etc. The output from this analysis could be a 'map', but of equal relevance it could be in tabular, graphical or textual form. This is the realm of traditional spatial analysis, image analysis or a range of spatial products that I like to term 'Spatial Intelligence Frameworks' e.g. Cohga's Weave, NGIS' GeoSamba, ESRI Australia's Eview. I fall into the second camp and try to implement systems that help end users to explore and better utilise their data. For effective analysis to be undertaken, you need to understand your data and ensure that there are appropriate aspatial attributes to query and analyse to find an answer to your problem. While this is relatively straight forward for project work where you control the data capture and QA processes, it starts becoming very messy as soon as you start to try and take advantage of data captured by other people and organisations. Typically we find that another organisation has captured data describing the same geographic phenomena for a different purpose, modelled the data differently, with different fields and data types. This requires lost time and effort in trying to massage the data into a format that we can use and requires compromises in what can be considered an acceptable outcome. Throw into this the big picture issues that we are facing, e.g. Climate Change, Water Shortage (in Australia) etc that require analysis at a continental or global scale and we have a big problem. How can we as an industry help this work to progress quickly with minimal impact on the analysis, minimal double handling of data and in many cases the use of dynamic data from multiple sources? This is the context in which I made my original post. As I discussed, I think that the geoscience community is showing us a potential way forward with their community work developing the GeoSciML profile. Anyone who has worked with geological data will appreciate the magnitude of their accomplishments to date. This includes a way of describing one of the most abstract types of spatial data an a consistent way that can be understood by people of different cultures and different languages. This effort has taken a community four to five years to develop to its current state with considerable effort. How do we get consistent schema / ontologies / profiles for other spatial phenomena? You are right in that it could be a GSDI responsibility. It could also be an Enterprise Architecture responsibility (e.g. FEA Data Reference Model). In the end, I suspect that we will need community driven involvement to get it right. Communities of practice (like the geoscience community) will need to work together to develop *their* profiles describing *their* data. Is it an OSGeo responsibility? Probably not. I take the point of your earlier email that OSGeo is predominantly about OS software. Is this an issue that OSGeo can help with? Possibly. When you consider the analysis requirement for spatial data, I suspect that we as an industry may be heading in the wrong direction. Some of the issues that are are attracting a lot of effort are about simplifying spatial data (GeoRSS, GeoJSON, BXFS etc). These appear to be about catering to the 'pretty picture' use of spatial information. I'm regularly seeing serious efforts to address the analysis use of spatial data (e.g. GML 3 and complex features) ridiculed. I'm not saying that there is no use for the pretty pictures. There certainly is and Google in particular is catering to this very well and increasing the awareness of spatial information amongst decision makers and the public alike. Meanwhile 2050 is fast approaching, if we are to believe the climate change predictions. Bruce Bannerman signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
