Welcome to the Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP)

Our Wiki site has been down for a while, so our calendar and notes are a bit behind. Our next meeting is Wed. Feb. 20 11-noon EST.

The minutes from the Wednesday meeting January 16, 2008, are now available under Meetings and the draft has been update to improve the quality of the notes. The latest draft of the survey is available for the Work Groups page.

It has been stated that up to 80% of all information contains some notion of location. Indeed, this provides opportunity for some of the fundamental stitching needed to sew the Semantic Web. A widely-used, common set of spatial ontologies would enable the linkage of data from a vast & varying number of domains that will need to interoperate in the Semantic Web. To date, such a set of multi-purpose, robust spatial ontologies has yet to emerge. Hence, this semantic wiki serves as a collaborative forum for the development of such a set of common spatial ontologies for the Semantic Web that could eventually lead to standardization.

We seek to build strong momentum for such development by utilizing the wiki to formalize a Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP will serve as a hub for researchers, technologists, practitioners & the user community to converge and collaborate on matters pertaining to spatial ontology. It should be noted that this forum is strictly constrained to focus on issues relevant to spatial ontology alone. It does not serve the interests of corporations nor serve general interests concerning technology, Semantic Web, etc.

How to Contribute

If you would like to help contribute content, simply click on "(Create Account)" above. You will be instructed to create a username (an email address) and password. Once your account has been created, you're ready to go! Contributions can occur in the form of adding textual content to the wiki and the ability to upload and edit ontologies (click on "OWL View").

Thanks for the help!

For help with questions contact the SOCoP Executive Secretary: Gary Berg-Cross at gary.berg-cross@em-i.com

Welcome to SOCoP SOCOP File Download Area SOCoP Charter SOCoP Strategy

Now that a blog ability has been added to the SOCoP Wiki we might post some interesting ideas and discussion topics.  For example we have been discussing 2 types of geospatial ontology surveys - for for people who have issues, such as interoperability, that ontologies might address and another for a more select group of people that are actually building such ontologies.  By conducting 2 surveys we might help connect the 2 groups.

 Gary Berg-Cross,

Cognitive Psychologist