#linked science

A project "The Triangle of Sustainability" (in German “Dreieck der Nachhaltigkeit”) by  Thomas Bartoscheck and Tomi Kauppinen from the MUSIL Lab at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster was  awarded 8000€ and a Finalist Position and is competing for the first prize  in Wissenschaft interaktiv 2012, June 2–6, 2012, Lübeck, Germany.

The Triangle of Sustainability is an interactive show to explore observations about deforestation of rainforests and related phenomena such as road networks, political situation, and market prices of agricultural products on maps and timelines.  The Triangle thus connects three important aspects–ecological, economical and social–of sustainability. By doing this the Triangle serves as a show of what is achievable by  interconnecting different scientific assets via the Linked Science approach. The goal is to raise the awareness, and understanding of different factors of sustainability. The Triangle thus serves as an example of how the research field of Geoinformatics, and more generally Geographic Information Science can serve the society in these tasks.

The resulting information can be explored on three screens (see the figure above). The interaction is made extremely simple yet powerful, no additional tools are required for the participants. All the spatial and temporal information can be zoomed and panned simply by making gestures using hands.

First course worldwide on Linked Science will be held at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster, Germany during the winter semester 2011/2012. This Linked Science course is arranged as a seminar, and the title is "Spatiotemporal and Semantic Modeling for Linked Science".

The seminar teaches both basics and shows recent advancements of Linked Spatiotemporal Data and Linked Science. The seminar is combined of lectures and demo-sessions showing through examples how spatiotemporal information can be modeled, semantically described and published as Linked Data. The major emphasis is on scientific datasets.

In the course we will also discuss spatiotemporal and semantic reasoning techniques to enrich the data. Students will also  learn how the data can be connected with the help of the SPARQL package for R for statistical analysis, and how and which visualization techniques and tools are available for interacting with the data. Each student will choose a topic for the seminar to create and use Linked Scientific Data of some discipline (e.g. arts, biology, health, history, cultural heritage) within the University of Muenster.

During the last few days and weeks we (Krzysztof Janowicz, Carsten Keßler, Alexander Savelyev and Tomi Kauppinen) created a Linked Data set about the people, papers and proceedings  of the COSIT (Conference on Spatial Information Theory) series.

The result is now opened and can be interacted with at Spatial.LinkedScience.org! We look forward to maintain the portal as a community effort in order to serve back the community, i.e. the researchers of the Spatial Information and Geographic Information Science. 

The following publication will be published in the The Executable Paper Grand Challenge at ICCS 2011 to explain ideas about Linked Open Science:

Tomi Kauppinen and Giovana Mira de Espindola. Linked Open Science---Communicating, Sharing and Evaluating Data, Methods and Results for Executable Papers. The Executable Paper Grand Challenge, in proceedings of The International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2011). Elsevier Procedia Computer Science series, Singapore, June, 2011.