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

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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. Demonstration Problem Level Abstraction Understanding of Data in a Geospatial View

10. 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

11. 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

12. Demonstration Changing Semantics

13. Lineage Search Metadata Reporting Automated Re-Processing Ontology
Modeling
Search

14. Modeling