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<title>Geospatial Incubator Group</title>
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<ul id="navbar" style="font-size: 0.6em;">
<li><a href="#scope">Scope and Objectives</a></li>
<li><a href="#cases">Use Cases</a></li>
<li><a href="#deliverables">Deliverables</a></li>
<li><a href="#coordination">Dependencies</a></li>
<li><a href="#communication">Communication</a></li>
<li><a href="#decisions">Decision Policy</a></li>
<li><a href="#patentpolicy">Patent Policy</a></li>
<li><a href="#meetings">Meetings</a></li>
<li><a href="#input">Input and Reference Materials</a></li>
<li><a href="#about">About this Charter</a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/" shape="rect"><img alt="W3C" src=
"/Icons/w3c_home.png" height="48" width="72" /></a> <a class=
"domainlogo" href="http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/" shape=
"rect"><img src="../images/incubator.png" alt=
"Incubator Activity" /></a></p>
<h1 id="title">Geospatial Incubator Group Charter</h1>
<p class="mission">The <strong>mission</strong> of the <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/">Geospatial Incubator Group</a>,
part of the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/">Incubator
Activity</a>, is to
begin addressing 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, and formulating a proposal for a W3C Local Web working group to develop recommendations to further the Local Web.
</p>
<div class="noprint">
<p class="join"><a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/39363/join">Join the Geospatial Incubator Group.</a></p>
</div>
<table class="summary-table">
<tbody>
<tr id="Duration">
<th rowspan="1" colspan="1">End date</th>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">23 Jun 2007</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Confidentiality</th>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">Proceedings are <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/comm.html#confidentiality-levels"
shape="rect">public</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Initial Chair</th>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">Joshua Lieberman (<a href=
"mailto:jlieberman@traversetechnologies.com" >jlieberman@traversetechnologies.com</a>)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Sponsoring Members</th>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">
<ul>
<li>Open Geospatial Consortium (Raj Singh, <a href=
"mailto:rsingh@opengeospatial.org">rsingh@opengeospatial.org</a>)</li>
<li>SRI (David Martin, <a href="mailto:martin@AI.SRI.COM" >martin@AI.SRI.COM<span class=
"c7">)</span></a></li>
<li>USC ISI (Jerry Hobbs, <a href="mailto:hobbs@isi.edu">hobbs@isi.edu</a>)</li>
<li>Stanford University (Deborah McGuinness, <a href=
"mailto:dlm@ksl.stanford.edu" >dlm@ksl.stanford.edu</a>)</li>
<li>Oracle Corporation (Xavier Lopez, <a href=
"mailto:xavier.lopez@oracle.com">xavier.lopez@oracle.com</a>)</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="1" colspan="1">Usual Meeting Schedule</th>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">Telcons: Fortnightly<br />
Ftf: 3-4 per year (<a href="#meetings">more on meetings</a>)</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<div class="scope">
<h2 id="scope">Scope and Objectives</h2>

<p>Location and geographical properties of resources has always
been something of a dilemma for the World Wide Web, which has
served so well to unlink the global identity of a resource from its
physical location on the globe. One of the Web's greatest values is
its capacity for enabling the growth of communities which are not
constrained by distance and geography. Nonetheless, physical
location is at least an essential property if not a part of the
identity of any real entity. When appropriate, the Local Web of
resources identified by location and geography is an essential
aspect of Web discovery and communication.</p>
<p>Issues in geographical representation are many and often
parallel those in the Web as a whole, from resource identifiers to
machine-readable semantics. Just as there are both physical (IP)
and conceptual (domain namespace) locators on the World Wide Web,
there are physical (latitude-longitude coordinates and street
addresses) and conceptual (placenames and political divisions)
locators on the Local Web. Geospatial concepts and relationships
are at once as possible and difficult to define with formal
semantics as those which express any other resource meaning.
Geospatial aspects of progress from the Web of text and tags to the
Semantic Web are just as challenging and important.</p>
<p>There are, however, unique aspects to the geospatial
representation of information which merit special attention in the
advancement of the Web as a whole. The map is not the terrain; a
geographic coordinate pair is only a terse representation of a
geographical entity. Something as simple as a geotagged Web
page &ldquo;a representation of a
representation&ldquo; raises unresolved semantic,
syntactic, and engineering issues which have until now hindered
full development of the Local Web. Yet another set of issues is
raised by the fact that it is not always
desirable or &ldquo;safe&ldquo; for world
to know where a resource lives.
Some of the gateways from the World Wide Web to the Local Web
require gates and gatekeepers.</p>
<h3>Objectives</h3>
<p>The Geospatial XG has three objectives which address needs of the Local
Web:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<i>Immediate</i>: update and harmonization with
GeoRSS of the GEO vocabulary, aka simplest useful geospatial
ontology.
</li>
<li>
<i>Short Term</i>: draft recommendations for a
geospatial ontology focused on Web resources and tasks.
</li>
<li>
<i>Longer Term</i>: draft a charter for a proposed W3C Local Web
WG to address issues beginning with geotags and continuing towards
geospatial enablement of the Semantic Web.
</li>
</ul>
<h4>GEO:</h4>
<p>The W3C Semantic Web Interest Group formulated in 2003 an
initial <a href="/2003/01/geo/">RDF vocabulary for location</a> .
The opportunities presented by RSS and Atom for geolocating
lightweight information formats, together with advances in
standardization of location encoding from the Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC) have prompted an update of this vocabulary in the
form of <a href="http://www.georss.org/">GeoRSS</a>. This update
both extends the expressiveness of the initial vocabulary and places
it in a firmer context of OGC and ISO work on geographic
information.</p>
<h4>Geospatial Ontology</h4>
<p>As enabling technologies for the Semantic Web have developed,
such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and SWRL, much work has been done to
build the ontologies required for expressing the common elements of
disparate knowledge artifacts. This is particularly true in the
realm of geospatial and temporal concepts and relationships, yet
the work has not yet reached a level of either consensus or
<i>actionability</i> which would allow it to be the basis of
knowledge interoperability. In other words, it is not yet ready to
support the functionality of a Geospatial Semantic Web, where the
geographic properties of knowledge resources can be expressed,
discovered, acted upon by machines, and understood by diverse
communities.</p>
<h4>W3C Local Web Working Group</h4>
<p>A latitude-longitude coordinate pair may be the shortest path to
an initial resource geo-identity, but issues of location and
geography permeate virtually all areas in which the World Wide Web
of physical entities is becoming richer and more functional. The
emergence of geographic information science disciplines and
standardization efforts by many organizations worldwide have shown
how important it is to <i>get geography right</i>. A W3C Local Web
Working Group would be the right place to develop the vocabularies,
ontologies, rules, and practices to do this. A subsequent or
adjacent Interest Group could potentially augment this effort by
representing a Local Web perspective in other W3C activities. A Geospatial
XG is proposed in part to undertake this sort of planning and
charter development.</p>

</div>
<h2><a name="cases" id="cases"></a>Use Cases</h2>
<p>The demand for flexible and powerful geospatial enablement of
the Web is exemplified in the following use cases.</p>
<h3><a name="use1" id="use1"></a>Use case 1: Find stuff nearby</h3>
<p>Web publishers have tagged their HTML content with a variety of
standard geographic properties, including absolute geometries,
well-known placenames, street addresses, and geospatial domain
addresses. Internet search engines have translated and indexed
these geospatial properties according to location and content
relationship. Web user Harold shares his location in a search
request for available sports-related resources within 15 minutes
travel time. An initial search for nearby transportation uncovers
roads, trails, and a commuter rail line which define a travel time
envelope. A second search finds a number of Web pages which refer
to sports-related resources within the envelope. The resources
include a sports bar within walking distance and the segment of a
lake shore recreation area within driving distance. It does
<i>not</i> include the travel blog of Maude, a former professional
triathlete sitting at a cafe nearby, because the current blog entry
is tagged by a geospatial domain name which can only be resolved to
an absolute location by requests from an identified group of
friends or emergency response organizations. Since the local time
of the search is 9:15 pm and the lake park closes at 9 pm, the home
page of the sports bar is listed first.</p>
<h3><a name="use2" id="use2"></a>Use case 2: News of the world</h3>
<p>Web news services provide their stories in the form of GeoRSS
feeds. Sven at UNHCR is tasked with monitoring both new and known
areas for refugee issues. He utilizes an aggregator service which
plots on a world map the locations of public news items which also
reference refugee issues. Sven's GeoRSS client also allows him to
visualize private news feeds of current UNHCR activities and
available relief resources. Sven is able to use several map
visualization techniques to look at the combined distribution and
nature of events referenced by the public and private news feeds.
Clicking on a particular entry, he brings up that entry's source
news story or internal report. Once he has identified a significant
collection of events and commented on it, he saves a Web map
context document (WMC) with GeoRSS annotations, specific Web Map
Server requests, and general map tile references to his weblog. UN
colleagues who subscribe to Sven's weblog feed receive a GeoRSS
news item outlining his area of interest and follow it to bring up
the news map he has constructed for them.</p>
<h3>Use case 3: New knowledge from old geography</h3>
<p>A new educational initiative has published to the Web in
geo-enabled form the results of many years of scientific and
cultural study related to Breechcloth National Monument. Joe, a
Park Service volunteer organizes virtual tours by publishing Web
pages which reference those Web resources related to a particular
theme along popular hiking trails. Mary, a park visitor, is able to
assemble her own personal tours by drawing a path of interest on a
visitor center kiosk and searching for resources of a particular
time and theme of interest. Since the wireless connectivity in the
Monument is not yet widespread, she downloads the tour into her
GPS-equipped phone to take along. Her personal tour includes
geoweblog entries and photos posted by visitors two years previous
at a time when heavy rains caused many unusual plants to bloom
along her chosen (and now quite dusty) path. Another tour resource
is a page describing the site of a rare archaeological find. Mary is
able to view the photographs and drawings on her phone, but the
public page is only tagged with a rather large bounding box to
reduce the risk of a visitor finding and damaging the site itself.
Park personnel and researchers have access to a separate page
tagged with the actual GPS coordinates of the site.</p>
<h3><a name="use4" id="use4"></a>Use case 4: Follow the
geography</h3>
<p>Alice is preparing a grant proposal to support a new recycling
initiative in Nepotist County. She wants to research county-level
recycling programs worldwide. Firing up her semantic search client,
she initiates a SPARQL query which includes among others the
concepts of "county",
"spatialScaleOf", and
"recycling". Referencing a
geospatial ontology, the query agent infers further geospatial
concepts such as county instances and the names of county
equivalents such as "parish" within
the state of Louisiana. Inferred queries are passed on to other
query agents which resolve county locations and synonyms, as well
as concepts related to "recycling"
such as "waste disposal",
"sanitation", and
"reuse". Filter agents reason on
"spatialScaleOf" to eliminate
discovered knowledge which is too limited in scale. Semantic
similarity analysis finally returns to Alice information about a
recycling program only two counties over which is a good model for
her proposal but has been sparsely documented as
"regional resource recovery". The
query agent also processes her personal context with the query and
returns unexpected references to two foundations with new programs
to fund combined recycling and clean government initiatives.</p>
<h3><a name="useSum" id="useSum"></a>Use case summary</h3>
<p>These use cases serve to illustrate that tagging Web pages with
latitude-longitude coordinates is only a starting point to the
geospatial representations, relationships, resources, and
interfaces which will form the functional basis of the Local
Web.</p>

<div>
<h2 id="deliverables">Deliverables</h2>
<ol>
<li>
<p>An updated, harmonized GEO vocabulary.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Report of initial Geospatial Ontology recommendations.</p>
</li>
<li>A draft Local Web Working Group charter.</li>
</ol>
<p>The objectives of the XG involve mainly the assembly and
reconciliation of materials which have already been developed in a
number of forums; it is expected that they can be accomplished in
6-8 months.</p>

</div>
<div class="dependencies">
<h2 id="coordination">Dependencies</h2>
<p>The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc (<a href=
"http://www.opengeospatial.org/">OGC</a>) is an international
industry consortium of 310 companies, government agencies and
universities participating in a consensus process to develop
publicly available model, interface and encoding specifications for
geospatial information. OpenGIS&reg; specifications support
interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and
location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC interoperability
initiatives help members to develop new methods of distributed Web
computing which would not be possible without agreement on how to
represent, exchange, and operate on geographic concepts. Versions
of many OGC specifications have subsequently been developed through
collaborative agreement into <a href="http://www.iso.ch/">ISO</a>
standards.</p>

</div>
<div class="communication">
<h2 id="communication">Communication</h2>
<p>
All technical work is on a public mailing list
public-xg-geo@w3.org (<a href=
"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-geo/">archive</a>)
and Web pages. The mailing list will provide an
important part of the communication both internally and
externally.</p>

<p>The group's Member-only list is member-xg-geo@w3.org (<a href=
"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-xg-geo/">archive</a>)</p>
<p>Information about the group (deliverables, participants,
face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/">Geospatial Incubator Group
home page</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="decisions">
<h2 id="decisions">Decision Policy</h2>
<p>This Incubator Group makes decisions by consensus, manages
dissent and maintains standing of its participants according to the
<a href="/Consortium/Process/">W3C Process Document</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="patent">
<h2 id="patentpolicy">Patent Policy</h2>
<p>This Incubator Group provides an opportunity to share
perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds
Incubator Group participants of their obligation to comply with
patent disclosure obligations as set out in <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy/#sec-Disclosure" shape=
"rect">Section 6</a> of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Incubator
Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when
Incubator Group participants review Recommendation-track
specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure
obligations do apply.</p>
<p>Incubator Groups have as a goal to produce work that can be
implemented on a Royalty Free basis, as defined in the <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy/" shape="rect">W3C
Patent Policy</a>.</p>

<p>For more information about disclosure obligations for this
group, please see the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/"
shape="rect">W3C Patent Policy Implementation</a>.</p>

</div>

<h2 id="meetings">Meetings</h2>
<p>In an effort to minimize costs, face to face meetings will be
co-located with other meetings that a significant number of
participants are attending. Examples include planned spatial
ontology workshops in May and June, the SeBGIS'06 workshop in
October, as well as the Terra Cognita workshop at ISWC'2006 in
November.</p>
<h2><a name="input" id="input"></a>Input and Reference
Materials</h2>
<dl>
<dt>GEO</dt>
<dd><a href="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/">http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/</a></dd>
<dt>GeoRSS</dt>
<dd><a href="http://www.georss.org/">http://www.georss.org</a></dd>
<dt>WMC</dt>
<dd><a href=
"https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=8618">https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=8618</a></dd>
<dt>GML</dt>
<dd><a href=
"http://www.opengis.net/gml/">http://www.opengis.net/gml/</a></dd>
<dt><a name="rdf-cl" id="rdf-cl"></a>OWL</dt>
<dd><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/">http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/</a></dd>
<dt>SPARQL</dt>
<dd><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/">http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/</a></dd>
<dt>RSS</dt>
<dd><a href=
"http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</a>
and <a href=
"http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/">http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/</a></dd>
<dt><a name="atom" id="atom"></a>ATOM</dt>
<dd><a href=
"http://atomenabled.org/">http://atomenabled.org/</a></dd>
</dl>
<h2 id="about">About this Charter</h2>
<p>This charter for the Geospatial Incubator Group has been created
according to the <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/procedures" shape=
"rect">Incubator Group Procedures documentation</a>. In the event
of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any
charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take
precedence.</p>
<hr />
<address>
<a href=
"http://www.traversetechnologies.com/">Joshua Lieberman</a>
&lt;<a href=
"mailto:jlieberman@traversetechnologies.com">jlieberman@traversetechnologies.com</a>&gt;
</address>
<p class="copyright"><a rel="Copyright" href=
"http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#Copyright" shape=
"rect">Copyright</a>&copy; 2006 <a href="http://www.w3.org/"
shape="rect"><acronym title=
"World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</acronym></a>
<sup>&reg;</sup> (<a href="http://www.csail.mit.edu/" shape=
"rect"><acronym title=
"Massachusetts Institute of Technology">MIT</acronym></a> ,
<a href="http://www.ercim.org/" shape="rect"><acronym title=
"European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics">ERCIM</acronym></a>
, <a href="http://www.keio.ac.jp/" shape="rect">Keio</a>), All
Rights Reserved.</p>
<p>$Date: 2006/07/06 16:06:23 $</p>
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