NordGIScience – Day 1

I’m currently attending the NordGIScience summer school and thought it could be of value to add some posts related to it.

I arrived at Gävle late sunday evening and found the hotell fairly easy.  The hotell is ok, but nothing more.

Monday started off with registration and some opening notes with an emphasis on the networking opportunities that the summer school offered.  Which is nice, in my oppinion. The original plan was that Jean-Claude Thill was going to hold a lecture , unfortunately Mr. Thill was stuck in Atlanta airport due to bad weather. This resulted in Bin Jiang stepping in and taking the first part of the lecture.  The lecture consisted of a (very) brief introduction to Knowledge Discovery, (Spatial) Data Mining, Self Organising Maps (which later should be of huge importance) and the importance of the notion that “Spatial is Special”(!). Mr. Jiang is an energetic person, which held a lively presentation.

Following was lunch break in the cantina. The lunch consisted of a pasta salad with chicken,  green salad and tzatziki. Which was quite amusing for the Italian guy:)

Then it was time for the afternoon session which Vasily Popovich had responsibility for.

This session consisted of a theoretical lecture followed by a practical session using the Intelligent GIS tool developed by the oogis.ru team. In short the intelligent GIS idea consists of integrating techniques from the field of artifical intelligence (AI) with GIS techniques, mainly computational techniques.

The tool develop implemented this by the combination of using an Ontology, Rule base, Rule engine, traditional relational database and a map visualization tool. In short the tool is an extension to the ontology/rule engine Protégé. I’ve been using Protégé before, and find the principle idea of ontologies fascinating and potential very useful. However, I do not see the potential of success for ontologies with the current human interface for them. The current interfaces I’ve been looking at (such as Protégé) have issues, especially regarding usability. It is almost impossible to create and maintain a large, stable ontology without dedicating a large portion of your life to it. Unfortunately this was the case for the intelligent GIS as well. Although the ontology was created for us, and we only flickered with some instances and some rules associated with them. I strongly believe this needs better visual interactive interfaces. Probably the most needed feature is, in my opinion, to be able to easily get a quick, and correct, overview of the complete ontology, knowledge base and rules – in one view. Similar to what we find in conceptual modelling for large enterprise systems. However Intelligent GIS is  a good idea, which I definately see the potential and use of, however, if humans are supposed to use it effectively, then it needs to satisfy the humans requirements for usability and interaction.

The first day of the summer school ended with dinner at a local restaurant (greek or persian).

Del gjerne med andre!

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