Filed under: centred/focused
Here’s my attempt at a description of what the Centre does (written for an intelligent lay-person):
The Centre for Geospatial Science undertakes high quality, world-class research regarding information about objects and activities on, above or below the surface of the earth, with a particular emphasis on the spatial, locational aspects of such objects and activities (referred to as geospatial information). Objects and activities of interest may include (but are not limited to) physical, environmental, social or economic phenomenon.
The Centre’s research particularly focuses on the sharing and intelligent use of geospatial information. Our long-term vision is of a world in which a range of diverse users from across the globe can share, combine, understand and use each other’s geospatial information readily in order to solve real problems.
Specific areas of current research within the Centre in order to meet this vision include:
1) Research exploring the intelligent interpretation and use of geographic information, including work in semantics and ontologies, natural language processing and reasoning.
2) Research exploring intelligent discovery, data mining and analysis of geospatial (including remotely sensed) information.
3) Research developing technologies that provide infrastructures to underpin the sharing and remote invocation of geographic information by both humans and computers (geospatial interoperability).
4) Research exploring mobile, location-based technologies (for example, hand-held devices) including user interface and human factors issues.
The following diagram depicts current projects in each of these four areas:
- Semantically-aware spatio-temporal analysis (KS).
- Ontological registries (KS).
- Semantically-driven map schematisation (KS, SuA).
- Scientific knowledge infrastructures (KS).
- New methods for map schematisation and generalisation (SuA).
- Interoperability test bed (JS).
- Web service transformations for geospatial processing (JS).
- Multi-scale issues in spatio-temporal analysis (DL).
- Metadata and SDIs (DL).
- Agent-based systems for enhanced decision processes (VK).
- Human factors aspects of navigation (JN).
- Discovery and access of remotely sensed imagery (BP).
- Remote sensing image processing and pattern recognition (PD).
- GUI on hand-held devices for mobile navigation (ShA).
- Conceptual frameworks for SDIs and intelligent data management (SA-S).
8 Comments so far
Leave a comment
I think that more emphasis (in the text) should be put on processing, understanding, describing, analysing, exploring etc. geospatial information as oppose to sharing. As already discussed previously (and as I understand it) the long term vision of the Centre is not primarily the sharing component but rather the “INTELLIGENT use” (use is not the best term maybe exploration(?)) and discovery of the spatial information.
I like the division of our current research into the four groups. But I think that the 2nd group should be renamed. In my opinion, data mining belongs to intelligent discovery domain, therefore no need for repetition. I am however missing any reference to modelling of geospatial information.
What about renaming the second group to something like:
“Research exploring intelligent discovery, analysis and modelling of geospatial (including remotely sensed) information”
Alternatively the word modelling can be replaced with representation(?) although this might emphasise data modelling and probably omit spatio-temporal models.
Comment by Vera Karasova August 14, 2007 @ 11:04 amI just forgot to mention. Based on the Venn diagram most of the current research within the CGS belongs to the second group. That brings me back to my comment that this should be reflected in the long term vision of the Centre, or is it a coincidence?
Bear in mind that the diagram in its current representation has not been “calibrated” yet (individual researchers has not provided their opinion whether their project is categorised properly). Maybe this should be done in near future to identify what is the strongest research area.
Comment by Vera Karasova August 14, 2007 @ 11:34 amThat’s far more too INTELLIGENT for me …
No seriously I agree with Vera that you use too much the word intelligent for someone who did’t like it in the first place.
Nonetheless I quite like your decompositions of themes and projects but to carry on in the Venn diagram or ensemblist description I would put total or partial inclusions of sub-themes :
in fact I would keep just three broad categories of Geospatial intelligence, geospatial interoperability and Location based services and would fit the other as sub-themes e.g. geospatial semantics and reasoning could then be included in GeoIntell and GeoInterop (but not solely in the intersection of the two ; geospatial discovery would be totally in the intersection of the two and geospatial analysis would be a totally in geo intelli and also in the intersection of this last with geo interop.
To me this kind of sub-thees and why not sub-subthemes would help to define the three main ones. We could also use the brain storming of words (white board in your office) to semantically refine all the sub-parts in the final Venn … and then put porjects which could be in more than one sub-part.(a “after-brainstorming” white board activity on the Venn diagram?)
I like your introduction apart the rather pretentious “undertakes high quality, world-class research” and instead of the “intelligent use” of geospatial information (which I think nobody would say we do stupid things!) I would emphasise on the intrinsec intelligence of interelated informations of objects and activities, we try to emerge or reveal to make use of it.
Added the 24/08/2007 … I had a go at it (different stages of the picture can be seen on \\\CGSFiles\Didier)
Comment by didiercgs August 15, 2007 @ 4:09 pmThis my soup (with lots of ideas from Kristin) about it and about the description to put for the CFE:
Research within the Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS) focuses on geospatial information emerging from objects and activities in domains related to environmental, social, or economic phenomenon with particular interest on risk management from monitoring to disaster issues. Sharing, combining and understanding such information is at the basis to develop better modelling of our world in constant interaction with its spatial environment. With this aim CGS research activity covers three main themes: (i) geospatial intelligence (ii) geospatial interoperability and (iii) mobile location-based services with particular interets in data infrastructures, semantics, ontologies, Open Geospatial Consortium standards, data conflation, spatial reasoning, data discovering, data mining, and human factors,
Technologies for collection and dissemination of raw data together with rapid developments in positioning, broad-band mobile communications, sensor platforms and senor-web enablement, spatial search and pervasive computing are fundamentally changing the access to and use of location-based data in society. Aknowledging the multi-disciplinary aspects and impacts implied by gathering geospatial information, CGS is working within the University of Nottingham with colleagues in Geography, IESSG, Computer Science and the Institute of Ergonomics.
Comment by didiercgs August 17, 2007 @ 12:12 pmObviously in this soup (see above) I used also previous description (on CFE page) from Mike and I believed this approach is also addressing Peijun ideas about “Environmental Information Science” … though may be not enough?
Comment by didiercgs August 17, 2007 @ 12:17 pmI quite like the 3 challagenes posed by the USGS:
Comment by kmstock August 21, 2007 @ 5:14 pm1) Acquisition and extraction of information from environmental systems and processes.
2) Synthesis, analysis, interpretation and modeling of information on environemtal sytems and processes.
3) Communication and representation of information on environmental systems and processes.
We could use these as categorisations instead of the four I have proposed.
Those challenges by USGS is more about EIS. Perhaps the best way is adopt some of those ideas to improve the four researches.
Comment by Peijun August 21, 2007 @ 8:11 pmThe diagram is very nice!
A good way eh? I like to emphasize my eligible person A joke for you! What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese.
Comment by MazyFelleklaf October 28, 2008 @ 4:37 pm