Ordnance Survey – Great Britain's national mapping agency
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GeoSemantics collaborations
The Geosemantics research team has a number of active collaborations with universities and other organisations:
We sponsor an Engineering Doctorate in collaboration with the Web Science Research Initiative, based at the University of Southampton. The aim of the project is to understand how Ordnance Survey should operate in the “web-scale” semantic environment. That is, stepping into a future world where the semantic web is a reality, and huge volumes of semantically-annotated and interlinked data are available on the web, to make predictions about how we should design our semantic data models and tools and how we should prioritise research to address the larger and more immediately important problems confronting us in this world. The primary research question to be answered in the project is: How can people find, use and query our data efficiently at web-scale?
We are actively involved in the W3C Incubator Group RDB2RDF, investigating how relational databases can be mapped to RDF.
One of our team members, John Goodwin, is an Honourary Research Associate in the Information Management Group at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester. His input to the group has been to explain the OWL language and reasoning features that are important to Ordnance Survey.
We supplied data and an ontology to the AKTive PSI project at the University of Southampton and are planning future collaborations.
With the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, we are part funding a PhD to look into the development of formal axioms to underpin the ontological concepts we are developing. We are also collaborating on a project to develop a software tool to enable a domain expert to author an ontology in our "Rabbit" structured English, and automatically convert this into OWL syntax.
Completed projects and workshops:
We were involved in the W3C Geospatial Incubator Group to address issues of location and geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow, by taking a concrete step to update the W3C GEO vocabulary, laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive geospatial ontology.
At Oxford Brookes University® we collaborated with their School of Biological and Molecular Sciences: where a PhD student tested how ontologies are reused and recycled, through the development of freshwater ecology ontologies, authored from scratch or by reusing the Ordnance Survey hydrology ontology.
The GeoSemantics team chaired the organisation of the Terra Cognita 2006 : Directions to the Geospatial Semantic Web workshop which was held at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006) Athens, Georgia USA, on November 6th.
PhD project on Semantic Similarity Measures at the MUSIL Group, in the University of Münster
Ordnance Survey was a partner in the European Union 6th Framework project ORCHEStrA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management) The overall goal of ORCHEStrA was to design and implement an open service-oriented software architecture to improve the interoperability among actors involved in Multi-Risk Management. Our team led a workpackage on knowledge modelling - developing methods to systematically construct conceptual and logical ontologies for flood risk management, while considering the requirements for interoperability between geographical and risk analysis information.