From: John Flynn (jflynn@bbn.com)
Date: 01/24/03
-----Original Message----- From: mburke [mailto:mburke@darpa.mil] Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 4:38 PM To: 'Jerry Hobbs'; daml-all@daml.org; daml-pi@daml.org; jflynn@bbn.com; mdean@bbn.com; daml@ai.sri.com; nasher@bertie.la.utexas.edu; rusty@bbn.com; vinay@ai.sri.com; jennifer@gaia.arc.nasa.gov; forbus@northwestern.edu; Mark.Gorniak@rl.af.mil; knoblock@ISI.EDU; macgregor@ISI.EDU; russ@ISI.EDU; beth.sundheim@navy.mil Subject: RE: A DAML Spatial Ontology All, My thanks to Jerry Hobbs for getting this started. I encourage your participation as appropriate. I believe spatial/geo-spatial reasoning along with temporal reasoning to be an essential component of most military applications. Murray A. Burke Program Manager DARPA/IXO mburke@darpa.mil 3701 N. Fairfax Drive Phone: 703-696-2303 Arlington, VA 22203-1714 Fax: 571-218-4550 -----Original Message----- From: Jerry Hobbs [mailto:hobbs@ISI.EDU] Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 1:49 PM To: daml-all@daml.org; daml-pi@daml.org; mburke; jflynn@bbn.com; mdean@bbn.com; daml@ai.sri.com; nasher@bertie.la.utexas.edu; rusty@bbn.com; vinay@ai.sri.com; jennifer@gaia.arc.nasa.gov; forbus@northwestern.edu; Mark.Gorniak@rl.af.mil; knoblock@ISI.EDU; macgregor@ISI.EDU; russ@ISI.EDU; beth.sundheim@navy.mil Subject: A DAML Spatial Ontology When I talked about the DAML-Time ontology (http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~ferguson/daml/) at the last DAML meeting, Murray Burke said it would be great for some people to get together and do a DAML-Space ontology as well. This message is an attempt to organize such an effort. The aim of this ontology would not be to drive out any other work on spatial ontologies, but to provide a way for different spatial reasoning engines and spatial resources to communicate with each other, as well as a way for people to mark up the spatial information on their web sites. The goals of the effort would be to produce an ontology that would 1. Enable general, though not necessarily efficient, reasoning about spatial concepts. 2. Link with more efficient specialized reasoning engines for spatial reasoning. 3. Link with the numerous databases that exist containing a wealth of specific, e.g., geographical, spatial information. 4. Support convenient query capabilities for spatial information. The topics we would want to cover include the following (where I've listed the corresponding topics that DAML-Time covers): Space Time ----- ---- Topological relations Topological relations (e.g., RCC8) (e.g., interval algebra) Dimension -- Shape -- Length, area and volume Duration Latitude, longitude, elevation Clock and calendar Political subdivisions -- Please feel free to comment on this list. Much of the work will be focused on geographical knowledge, but the intent is not to restrict ourselves to this domain alone. Topological spatial relations are important in microbiology, for example. Other application areas that have been suggested are the geology of earthquakes, NASA application, computer graphics, and virtual reality. Of course to do a thorough spatial ontology is an immense job. I think we can restrict what we need to do by limiting ourselves to _linking_ with resources, rather than _duplicating_ them. For example, we would want to be able to interface with a resource on the shapes of geographical regions, but we would not need to encode its internal representations. As with DAML-Time, the aim would be to construct an ontology that accomodates many perspectives on controversial issues rather than forces a particular perspective. Let me know if you would be interested in participating in such an effort, as least as far as tracking the email. Also suggest any research and applications you think should be taken into account. It would also be extremely helpful to develop a set of challenge problems of varying levels of difficulty to help drive the development of the ontology. This message is being sent to a rather haphazard set of people, so please feel free to forward it to anyone else you think appropriate. -- Jerry Hobbs
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