[iaoa-general] Summer Institute 2015 Call for Participation: Spatial Ontologies for e-Science

[Michael Gruninger]

Call for Participation

The Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information  
Science and IAOA is announcing the
2015 Summer Institute:

Spatial Ontologies for e-Science
June 21-27, 2015
Bar Harbor, Maine, USA

Programme:
Location often acts as an integrator in science, bringing together  
perspectives across multiple disciplines and scales. For example,  
health scientists increasingly focus on where patients spend their  
time, pulling a large variety of environmental and social data into  
their analyses. With big data and e-science, this trend has  
accelerated and gets increasingly supported through knowledge  
infrastructures and associated ontologies. Yet, it is often unclear  
how knowledge about location and other spatial properties should best  
be captured, and there is only a very limited choice of spatial  
ontologies. This Vespucci Institute will ask why this is so and why  
there seems to have been so little progress over the past decade. It  
will push the frontiers on spatial ontologies for e-science by

*    identifying the gaps between the spatial ontologies that the  
e-science community needs and what is currently available from the  
ontology community;
*    addressing key gaps through hands-on ontology design on site;
*    discussing the impact of Linked Open Data on e-science and the  
role of space in this context;
*    collecting criteria and techniques for evaluating spatial  
ontologies in e-science;
*    broadening the discussion of ontology quality and ontology applications;
*    learning to separate approaches that work from those that do not;
*    reviewing the work of relevant standards organizations like W3C and OGC;
*    seeking insight on what needs to complement location to meet  
e-science needs (time?, feature?, event?, process? granularity?).

Facilitators
Peter Fox (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Michael Gruninger (University of Toronto)
Werner Kuhn (University of California, Santa Barbara)


Participants from all sectors of e-science, ontology engineering, and  
geospatial as well as other spatial sciences are invited to interact  
from June 22 to 26, 2015, in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. As always,  
the Vespucci Institute will challenge the state of the art through  
lively discussions and hands-on problem solving rather than lengthy  
presentations.


Travel and attendance grants are available
Deadline for applications: 15 April 2015
More information, programme and registration on http://www.vespucci.org