Rich Spatial Semantics:
Locations, Places, and Spatial Relations

GSS-US2TS is the Geospatial Semantics session of US2TS 2019: http://www.us2ts.org/

Session Summary

Location, space, and spatial relations are important for a broad range of fields such as geography, civil and environmental engineering, agriculture, public health care, emergency response, urban planning, and military intelligence. While semantic models and technologies for spatial information, such as Open Geospatial Consortium GeoSPARQL standard, include geometric features, coordinates, and simple topological relations, richer and more nuanced and diverse geospatial concepts and vocabularies have not received the same attention. These include representations and methods developed in spatial cognition, formal ontology, spatial knowledge representation and reasoning, qualitative spatial reasoning, and natural language processing. In many cases, geospatial concepts need to be modeled as multi-faceted ontological entities to be beneficial and not just as general locational attributes. Likewise, new and more efficient geocomputational methods are needed to support efficient geospatial information queries over the Geospatial Semantic Web to transparently share and exchange larger sets of geospatial information.

To address a range of geospatial concept semantics and computational methods that could be more widely used,  the Geospatial Semantics session at the U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium (US2TS) 2019 aims to compile presentations that examine conceptual and implemented approaches to this topic as they arise across disciplines and in cross-disciplinary communities. We invite abstracts for presentations of work that records, processes, queries, or uses semantics of spatial information in any way and in any discipline. Our objective is to bring disparate elements of the geospatial semantics community into a common session and explore paths forward for shared vocabularies, semantics, and innovative techniques. Abstracts reporting on work at any stage are sought – ranging from initial requirements for an application, preliminary semantic models, to recently completed projects.

Submission Guidelines

Format of Abstracts and Presentations

One-page abstracts are solicited from participants who would like to present. Participants are asked to touch on at least one of the following aspects in their abstract and presentations:

1.      a specific semantic query of interest and the relevant information that is needed,

2.      a geospatial data standard used or explored for use and obstacles for its adoption,

3.      a problem requiring integrating spatial information from two or more datasets, or

4.      a specific spatial concept or relation that you have studied/formalized.

Each presenter is further asked to briefly describe their disciplinary background and to pose 2 to 3 hypotheses, research questions, or challenges, which we will use to steer the discussion.

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 9, 2019 via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gssus2ts

DEADLINE EXTENDED January 25, 2019

We are additionally soliciting interest statements from people who want to participate but do not wish to present. Please submit at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gssus2ts  a very short statement indicating your interest and background.

Submitted abstracts, including those of the session organizers, will be reviewed prior to setting the session agenda. Selected presenters will give 3-5min lightning talks, organized in two blocks and followed by short responses from selected participants and a subsequent general discussion.

To stimulate interesting and cross-disciplinary discussions, we will group talks not by discipline but by the type of work discussed (recent developments, open problems, how semantics are used). The assigned presentation time may be adjusted based on the number of submissions we receive. If the number of quality submissions exceed 8-10, we will select the topics of most general interest for presentations and ask others with overlapping interests to respond after the presentation. The following session structure is proposed:

Committees

Organizing committee

• Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine (torsten.hahmann@umaine.edu)
• Gaurav Sinha, Ohio University (sinhag@ohio.edu)
• Dalia Varanka, U.S. Geological Survey (dvaranka@usgs.gov)
• Chuanrong (Cindy) Zhang, University of Connecticut (chuanrong.zhang@uconn.edu)

Contact

Questions about submissions should be emailed to Dalia Varanka, Corresponding Chair, or other chair persons of the committee.