Hi Scott, Tim, Alexander and whoever else are interested: I thought I would want to do a "nice" presentation of our work on the Spatial Decision Support Ontologies and the SDS Knowledge Portal, but then realized 1) Tim was just asking how the Portal was constructed and 2) we are in the middle of busy work of several projects and I won't be able to prepare a "nice" presentation until end of September. So I will just give an account of what we did below and would welcome any critiques, comments and suggestions.
Project background: Definition of SDS: "Spatial decision support (SDS) is the computational or informational assistance for making better informed decisions about problems with a geographic or spatial component. This support assists with the development, evaluation and selection of proper policies, plans, scenarios, projects, interventions, or solution strategies." The SDS ontologies are developed by a consortium of well-known scholars and experts in the field of Planning and Spatial Decision Support, including essential concepts about planning/decision problem types, context, planning process and its phases and steps, methods commonly used during a step, resources needed for planning and making decisions, as well the participation and collaboration aspect of things. With the SDS ontologies and the Portal, we hope to * Develop a conceptual framework to capture the knowledge and organize the information in planning and SDS, provide and standard vocabulary for the community, promote semantic clarity * Develop a registry of (references to) planning and SDS resources (such as process workflow templates, methods, tools, models, data sources, case studies, literature, etc. and make them easily accessible (this part is partially done), and promote interoperability among tools and models * Provide intelligent guidance and recommendations to help the user plan their planning process in choosing and configuring, based on their specific project needs, appropriate process workflow templates, methods and resources, and provide service chaining leveraging Cyber Infrastructure (this part is only in planning stage) The SDS Ontologies were made public in 2009, and the content is constantly being augmented. I won't go into the details of the ontology content and structure (unless someone is interested to know); you are welcome to browse the Portal at http://www.spatial.redlands.edu/sds/ . About the construction of the web application (the Portal): * The SDS ontologies are developed using TBC, stored in n3 format. At the time of the new ontology content release, we export the ontology to AllegroGraph triple store. * We have developed a set of SDS ontology web services that would retrieve content from the triple store (SPARQL queries plus some code). * Based on the user input/request, the Portal sends requests to the relevant ontology web services to get the relevant content of the ontology, dynamically constructing a web page to present the content A few notes: * We are moving to storing the ontology content in AllegroGraph triple store to begin with, so that any updates to the ontology will be reflected on the Portal right away (well, after an approval process) * Besides the usual content, we have coded in the ontologies a few things related to Portal display: o Order of things (such as order of predicates, order of subclasses (if needed), order of instances (if need). o Whether a predicate and its content is to be displayed on the Portal or not (some predicates are for storing internal editing information, etc.) o Which predicates are to be used as search fields on the Portal * When needed, the ontology services apply reasoning using subsumption relations, other known structures in the ontology, etc. * Before the ontology release, we do some inferencing (a series of SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries) to derive extra triples through inverse relations, superclass-subclass relations, etc., including deriving extra ontology "branches" out of the predicate relations to give the user more browsing options We have developed the SDS ontologies and the Portal for a very practical purpose, and the main focus has been on content and the getting portal to work, and we also have a very real budget constraints, so we are often behind in deploying the newer and more advanced features of tools that we use (including TopBraid products). Now that SPIN is a candidate W3C standard, and the latest version of AllegroGraph supports SPIN (According to their announcement), we will look more into using SPIN to replace some of our own coding of things. I hope this message is not too long and I would be happy to elaborate further if you have some questions, and I look forward to your comments and suggestions. And again, I appreciate all the help I have been getting from the TBC team and all the discussions in this user group! Best, Naicong ______________________________ Naicong Li, Ph.D. Senior Research and GIS Analyst Redlands Institute, University of Redlands 1200 East Colton Avenue, PO Box 3080, Redlands, CA 92373-0999 Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott Henninger Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 9:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [topbraid-users] RE: Semantic Application Examples Naicong; Another recent question asked about interesting Semantic Web applications, so I think this would be a good place to discuss more general Semantic Web issues and how TopBraid plays a part in the application. Please, we'd like to hear more! -- Scott On 8/3/11 7:13 PM, Li, Naicong wrote: Thank you very much Tim! I will email you offline about our work on the Spatial Decision Knowledge (SDS) Portal, for I am afraid that this forum is for TBC related technical discussions only, unless others want to hear about it as well. I do want to say just this - yes we have been using TBC to develop the SDS ontologies, and the Portal is driven by these ontologies, both in terms of content as well as display options and other functionalities. And I really appreciate the quality of TBC, its constant improvement, and of course, the people behind it! Best, Naicong From: Smith, Tim [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 4:00 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Cc: Li, Naicong Subject: Semantic Application Examples On the subject of Semantic Applications, while doing a search recently, I came across the work of one of our fellow TBC users, Naicong Li. Naicong has created a very nice semantically-enabled knowledge portal for Spatial Decision Support. I'm not sure what that is exactly but it appears to be related to planning land use, natural resource utilization, etc... The portal is very nice and really shows off the strengths of an ontology driven system. Perhaps Naicong could share how this portal is constructed? I don't want to guess, especially since I do not know Naicong. You can find the portal at [1] And a great video with slides and transcription where Naicong presents her work at [2] [1] http://www.spatial.redlands.edu/sds/ [2] http://video.esri.com/watch/193/2011-geodesign-summit-naicong-li-developing-a-conceptual-framework-for-geodesign -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Group "TopBraid Suite Users", the topics of which include TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Live, TopBraid Ensemble, SPARQLMotion and SPIN. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-users?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Group "TopBraid Suite Users", the topics of which include TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Live, TopBraid Ensemble, SPARQLMotion and SPIN. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-users?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Group "TopBraid Suite Users", the topics of which include TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Live, TopBraid Ensemble, SPARQLMotion and SPIN. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-users?hl=en
