Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, is investigating how semantic web technologies assist its role as a geographical information provider. A major part of this work involves the development of prototype products and datasets in RDF. This article discusses the production of an example dataset for the administrative geography of Great Britain, demonstrating the advantages of explicitly encoding topological relations between geographic entities over traditional spatial queries. We also outline how these data can be linked to other datasets on the web of linked data and some of the challenges that this raises.is already evidence of how important GI is for the Web today, from the large investment of all three main search engine providers, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, in collecting GI to aid local search. A place name is one of the simplest forms of location information. Place names are often used in simple web searches such as: "Find me all pizza restaurants in Southampton", or "Find me holiday destinations in Cornwall". This suggests that gazetteers (indexes of place names) are a very useful addition to the semantic web. Geonames (http://sws.geonames.org/6269131/about.rdf), DBpedia (http://DBpedia.org/ page/England) and the CIA World Factbook (http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/factbook/) are RDF datasets that include this type of information. However, none of these properly describes the official administrative geography of Great Britain as laid down by Parliamentary legislation though Statutory Instruments (House of Commons 2008), a resource that has already been requested by other RDF projects (Tennison and Sheridan 2008). With respect to geographical information, RDF does have a significant limitation in that it cannot support any form of spatial indexing. Thus the ability to spatially query GI in the traditional sense, or to perform many standard GIS operations such as buffering or containment within a user defined area, are either not possible, or would prove to be so computationally inefficient as to render them unusable. At this stage we see this as an important constraint on what is possible, but not as a reason to abandon RDF. Rather, we feel there are still significant advantages to using RDF for GI and, in time, we expect solutions to these limitations to emerge. Given our desire to investigate the representation of GI using RDF, the need for authoritative geographical names, and the limitations imposed by RDF in terms of spatial querying, we decided that a gazetteer representing the administrative areas of Britain would be the most appropriate form of geographical resource to investigate.The original description of the Semantic Web as outlined in Berners-Lee et al. (2001) was a vision of how software agents could understand the meaning of web content in order to find and process information across the web more accurately. The emergence of the Linked Open Data movement (Bizer et al. 2008b) or "web of data" from the original web of documents moves us further along the path towards ...
This paper describes the development of an architecture for the discovery of sensor services leveraging ontology-based semantics in the search query. A prototype has been implemented based upon the architecture and can be used to support the development of expert system applications in which sensors of certain types, operational capabilities or physical properties are required to support applications within a network-centric environment. In the prototype, sensor services are listed in a registry that references a machineinterpretable ontology. The registry conforms to the Universal Discovery and Description Interface (UDDI) specification, but it is augmented with semantic matching via an ontology to increase the likelihood that relevant sensor services are discovered when needed by expert system applications.
DefibViz is a software application developed for defibrillation simulation and visualization. It exploits both surface techniques and methods for the interactive exploration of volumetric datasets for the analysis of transthoracic defibrillation simulation results. DefibViz\ has a graphical user interface for the specification of the shape, size, position, and applied voltage of a defibrillator's electrodes. An option is provided for using 3-D slice plane widgets, which operate on the volumetric datasets, such that the distribution of the voltage gradient induced by an electric shock can be visually inspected in various tissues throughout the myocardium and torso. One goal of DefibViz is to enhance understanding of how electrode parameters relate to the change of the voltage gradient distribution throughout the heart, which may help lead to optimal defibrillator design. DefibViz; is significant, in that, it is built by using an open-source graphics and visualization framework providing a platform for subsequent modifiability and extensibility. Moreover, it integrates simulation and visualization techniques, which previously required the running of several independent software executables, into an enhanced, seamless, and comprehensive software application.
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