Geospatial and Problem Specific Semantics Danielle Forsyth, CEO and Co-Founder Thetus Corporation 20 June, 2006

Geospatial Semantics Brief Thetus introduction Spatial Representation Geospatial Ontologies Upper Level Ontologies Community Ontologies Problem Specific Ontologies Evolving Knowledge Demonstration

Thetus Thetus develops knowledge modeling and discovery infrastructure software for customers who: Have high-value data not easily structured using traditional database technology Has evolving meaning Has no single representation Need automated processing, notification and search Need recorded history of information Want to do predictive modeling

Defensible Tracking, Reporting, and Publishing Bridging the Knowledge Gap KNOWLEDGE & DISCOVERY HYPOTHESIS AND ANALYSIS TESTING AND VERIFICATION Defensible Tracking, Reporting, and Publishing DATA OBSERVATION MODELING EXPERIMENTATION STRUCTURED DATA TOOLS AND METHODS

Knowledge Modeling Applications and Portals Evolving Knowledge Models Workflow - analysis, notification, routing and filtering Lineage Tracking Evolving Metadata Data & Metadata

Dynamically Evolving Knowledge Base REASONERS AND INFERENCE ENGINES The Thetus Solution USER INTERFACE LAYER Real-Time Alerts Visualization Google Earth Analytics ESRI ArcPad Custom Clients WAN JSP SERVER .NET SERVER Dynamically Evolving Knowledge Base TASK SERVERS EXTERNAL DATA SOURCES THETUS PUBLISHER DATASTORE SERVERS PUBLISHER SERVER DATA SILOS Unmanaged Metadata ANALYTICS DATABASES TRIPLE STORES OTHER REPOSITORIES REASONERS AND INFERENCE ENGINES

Upper Level Ontologies Big concepts – time, space Minimal change - years of effort by big thinkers to standardize  Strive for a controlled vocabulary of concepts and relationships Domain Specific Ontologies Community concepts – generate by a “community of practice”/subject matter experts Periodic change – communities in widely differing states – agreement difficult  Strive for agreement on base concepts and relationships Problem Specific Ontologies Problem concepts – generally by those working on the problem Regular change – in vastly different directions – for publishing, hypothesis,..  Strive for understandable articulation of structure, interconnection of models, clear identification of model boundary conditions

Geospatial Semantics Terms and relationships that describe earth and space – where is the line between spatial descriptions and “stuff” in space? SWEET – concept search and map geophysical events. Switch personalities to represent different problem

Demonstration Problem Level Abstraction Understanding of Data in a Geospatial View

Context-Specific Access to Knowledge hasMember perpetrator alliedWith hasAlias Event Person Group Aggregate Data from multiple sources and “Slice and Dice By Context” Enables efficient information access and timely collaboration between departments and agencies, regardless of location. Enables analysts to build complex data models by applying a variety of contexts to a given set of data, providing a multi-dimensional view of information. Provides robust security features to regulate access to sensitive data and apply existing authentication policy. Policy-Based Access

Hidden Trends, Patterns, and Relationships among Data Dynamically-Evolving Knowledge Bases Rich Networks of Relationships Explicit Event hasMember perpetrator alliedWith hasAlias Person Implicit and Group Event Group Person Provides a universal context for understanding data, including real-time insight into previously unrecognized, potentially crucial relationships between information. Person Event Person Event Hidden Trends, Patterns, and Relationships among Data Group Group

Demonstration Changing Semantics

Lineage Search Metadata Reporting Automated Re-Processing Ontology Modeling Search

Modeling