[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 
Sciece 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