Universidade de Münster

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1 Universidade de Münster estudantes estudantesdas maisdiversasorigense culturas em todo o mundo 15 faculdades e cerca de 120 programas de graduação em praticamente todas as áreas das Ciência Humanas, Sociais, Exatas, Medicina e Música Terceira maior universidade da Alemanha Copyright: WWU/Peter Grewer Castelo da administração da universidade mais de 550 parcerias com instituições em todo o mundo 6 acordos de cooperação com instituições no Brasil Posição de liderança no programa ERASMUS da UE programas de estudos internacionais e cursos em inglês cursos binacionais com dupla titulação Copyright: WWU/Peter Grewer Biblioteca da Universidade A Universidade está ranqueada entre as melhores no CHE University Ranking A área de Ciências Exatas e Matemática está entre as 150 melhores do mundo no Ranking Shanghai Lucas Sartori bolsista CsF na Universidade de Münster Outro fator que faz muita diferença aqui éa presença do Centro Brasileiro na Universidade de Münster, que atua como um agente agregador para os brasileiros que aqui estão, tornando nosso dia a dia mais fácil, seja pelo suporte na resolução de questões burocráticas, ou pela descontração e interação proporcionada pelos encontros mensais, que podem inclusive ser uma boa oportunidade pra comer uma deliciosa feijoada! csf-alemanha.de Ofertas para graduação: Física Matemática Ecologia ambiental Sistemas de informação Geoinformática e agora: Medicina Ofertas para doutorado: Física Aplicada Física Nuclear Química Inflamação Infectologia Geoinformática Tutoriaespecialparaos bolsistas brasileiros

2 A Universidade de Münster tem tradição em cooperação com o Brasil, mantendo há mais de 45 anos relações com parceiros brasileiros. Atualmente existem cerca de 30 cooperações com 20 instituições brasileiras, em diversas áreas. Em 2010 foi fundado o Centro Brasileiro da Universidade de Münster, cuja missão é aprofundar as cooperações da WWU com o Brasil nos setores de ensino, pesquisa e transferência de conhecimento. O Centro Brasileiro com seu escritório de contato em São Paulo constitui também um serviço de apoio para universidades e estudantes brasileiros interessados em estudar e pesquisar na Alemanha, estando diretamente engajado na coordenação do programa Ciência sem Fronteiras na Universidade de Münster. Diretor científico: Prof. Dr.Ing. Bernd Hellingrath Diretor executivo: Dr. Ricardo Schuch Escritório no Brasil: Newton Pereira Homepage: muenster.de/brasilienzentrum CENTRO BRASILEIRO da Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität A cidade de Münster Fundada em 793 D.C. Münster tem mais de 1200 anos de idade Aproximadamente habitantes (dezembro de 2011) Mais de estudantes na cidade Local de assinatura do Tratado de Vestfália, que terminou em 1648 a Guerra dos Trinta Anos Atividades de laser: Andar de bicicleta (Münster é a cidade das bicicletas na Alemanha!) Passear no jardim botânico e nasalamedasda Promenade Relaxar no Porto de Münster e desfrutar dos muitos bares e discotecas Visitar os castelos no entorno da cidade Copyright Philipp Neuhaus Copyright Bernhard Kils Rua principal (Prinzipalmarkt) Copyright Bernhard Kils Catedral de São Paulo Copyright: WWU/Peter Grewer Jardim Botânico da Universidade Porto Copyright Rüdiger Wölk A cidade de melhor qualidade de vida no mundo! (LiveCom Award 2004) Copyright Münster Marketing Promenade Cidade da Ciência 2013 Copyright Pressestelle Münster Cidade das bicicletas

3 Project description Concept-Driven Semantic Modeling The aim of this initiative is to explore and progressively define the rich and diverse spatial conceptualizations necessary for dealing with complex, diverse spatial environments and the activities and processes which occur within such environments. Such conceptualizations range from abstract specifications of spatial theories, expressed as logical specifications capturing abstract properties relevant for modeling all kinds of space and spatial activities, to concrete thesauri, geographic glossaries and gazetteers and annotated linked data capturing details of environments and their objects of interest. Providing well defined and re-usable specifications of such conceptualizations in order to support practical problem solving is a substantial scientific challenge. Progress over the past five years suggests that the previous gap between top-down and bottom-up methods can finally be bridged productively. The initiative will select particular areas of focused attention as representing prime challenges at this time, driven by the common research challenge of coping with change in built environments. Solutions can be expected to have an impact on the field as providing advances in spatial representation relevant for a broad and diverse range of tasks going well beyond the concerns of the RTG. Among these tasks are the capturing of spatial activities, processes and motions-in-space; the ontological representation of functionally determined information, such as affordances and induced spatial entities (like the space that a door requires to be opened or the areas accessible by sight under extreme conditions like fire); the formal combination of large sets of (linked) data with ontological metaorganization for enhancing reasoning over domain knowledge, and the provision of well-worked out test cases for exposure and evaluation within applications. Cross-cutting these concerns are the mentioned challenges of flexibly bringing together diverse and heterogeneously specified knowledge to support reasoning and understanding. Typical examples within the built environment challenge involve models of buildings, which might include structural, functional and environmental information, all of which contribute to problem-solving and to planning and execution of the diverse activities that the users and

4 designers of such buildings may engage in. When change is added into this scenario the complexities and challenges raised are considerable. State of the Art This initiative builds upon and extends the previous initiative results in the area of semantic modeling and the rapid growth of geospatially referenced representations that has occurred worldwide. The formal modeling of the intended meaning of information elements (data values, data types, operators) is still most commonly undertaken through ontologies (Guarino 1998) and, over the past five years, the use of ontologies has expanded considerably (consider, for example, the Siri App on iphones). There are now substantial advances in both representational capabilities and resources for developing and maintaining ontologies, all of which will be brought into the activities undertaken within this research initiative. Of particular importance in the current context is the improved understanding that has been achieved of hybrid and heterogeneous ontologies i.e., ontologies that are made up of components with different formal properties. This supports the controlled combination of logically expressive languages necessary to axiomatize abstract properties of space or complex processes, with less expressive languages, such as those of thesauri and gazetteers. Such heterogeneous ontologies are called Networked Ontologies (e.g., Suarez-Figueroa and Gomez-Perez 2009) or hyperontologies (Kutz, Mossakowski, Lücke 2010). The most frequently employed form of logical specification is still description logics and the standard web ontology language OWL. Reasoning is performed with a few widely used engines, such as RACER (Haarslev and Möller 2001), Pellet (Parsia and Sirin 2004) or Fact++ (Tsarkov and Horrocks 2006). Beside classical subsumption reasoning and instance checking, engines such as the SIM-DL server also support similarity-based reasoning (Janowicz et al. 2007). There are now an increasing range of options for less restrictive specifications, including the ISO standardized Common Logic, in which a library of spatiallyrelevant specifications has been specified in the COLORE ontology repository (Gruninger, Toronto: Results have most recently been focused on providing ontologies for specific tasks, moving away from developing ever more large-scale generic ontologies supposedly applicable across domains. Many of these more focused ontologies and ontology patterns are relevant for the common research challenge of the RTG: the ambient assisted living ontologies of European projects such as Persona, OASIS, UniversAAL, the extensions of geographic modeling

5 languages into smaller scale objects such as cities and buildings, as well as the growing overlap of concerns between research and modeling standards such as those provided by the Building Information Modelling/Management (BIM) framework and the Industry Foundation Classes, used initially for describing building and construction industry data ( but now also being ported to ontology-based technologies. The evolving interaction of formal ontological work with application driven ontology design patters ( is an encouraging development that will be taken up and strengthened by this initiative. At the technical level of software architectures and languages for the production and use of semantic models of geospatial information, substantial progress has been made over the past decade. Useful architectures (mostly web-based), interface definitions, modeling languages, and tools needed for describing and sharing information together with its intended meaning are available (Kuhn 2005). Geospatial applications have greatly benefited from research and industry proposals for core information handling services, standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Technical Committee on Geoinformation of the International Standards Organization (ISO TC211). Based on these and other standards, spatial data infrastructures (SDI) are being established regionally and globally as well as vertically for application domains. Their architects are eager to include semantic descriptions of the contents offered, so that their users can assess and combine selections appropriately. This state of the art suggests potential interactions across the full spectrum from highly formal and abstract spatial theories to industry specifications. Placing such interactions on a proper and well-specified basis therefore offers both a host of scientifically challenging tasks and immense practical potential. Previous work by participants The IRTG progress report provides the details on the work of the (same) participants in its research initiative B on Semantic Mediation Across Communities and Sensors. Here, we report only on additional work done that is relevant to the redefined scope of this research initiative. At Bremen, throughout the lifetime of the DFG-funded collaborative research center on Spatial Cognition (SFB/TR8) of the universities of Bremen and Freiburg, RTG members have been involved with formalizing spatial theories as component ontologies (Bateman and Farrar 2004; Bateman, Hois, Ross and Tenbrink 2010) and in exploring the definition and use of

6 heterogeneous ontology frameworks (Bateman et al. 2007). The relation between such ontological specifications and their linguistic expression has also been explored in detail (Bateman 2010a, b). Currently a standardization initiative for heterogeneous ontologies is being pursued as an ISO working item in ISO/TC37/SC3/WG3 (Kutz, Mossakowski, Galinski, Lange 2011) under the guidance of the Bremen ontology group, adopting the hyperontology framework set out in Kutz, Mossakowsi and Lücke (2010). Close interaction with the participants in other research initiatives ensures that the combined team is excellently placed to drive integrated and synergistic research further (cf. Bhatt, Hois, Kutz 2012; Hois, Bhatt and Kutz 2009). At Münster, substantial work on ontological grounding through observations and on the formalization of image schemas, affordances, and the meaningful environment (of Gibson) has continued and provides a further pillar for this research initiative. An influential effort has gotten underway to use this work as a basis for the design of ontology patterns to annotate data about (to begin with) motion, path, event, and point-of-interest ( After many years of theoretical work on formalizing cognitive science ideas (Kuhn 2007), it finally appears that practical and further research applications are at hand through very elegant and expressive ontology design patterns based on that work. USGS (the US national mapping agency) has already committed to annotate their data with such patterns. In parallel, the continuing work on observation ontology (Kuhn 2009) has reached a scope encompassing not only sensor data and their conceptualizations, but the entire range of concepts relevant to observations and to reasoning about them, from grounding (Scheider et al. 2009) through granularity (Degbelo 2011) to reasoning about events and processes (Devaraju and Kauppinen 2010). An exchange has started with the US National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), to collaborate on observation ontology in ecology, and it looks likely that an IRTG PhD graduate will obtain a post doc position at this center. Research Questions One area of investigation identified in the IRTG period remains just as relevant for the RTG: that of semantic translation, popularized more than a decade ago through the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and since taken up in various research projects (see, e.g. More recent developments in heterogeneous ontology specifications provide much of the necessary framework for defining such translations but

7 there are still considerable practical and theoretical problems to be addressed. An automated solution of sufficient generality to support interoperability across different communities of use is still out of reach for the moment. Tackling the translation problem at the level of interacting domain theories (rather than shared vocabularies) remains one of the big current challenges and defines an important constellation of research questions. It requires much stronger formal bases than are currently available. We are pursuing both, geometrical (based on conceptual spaces) and logical approaches, combined with an extension of Scheider s (2011) grounding work. Another growing area that is ripe for development and focused research is the design methodology for ontology development growing up around Ontology Design Patterns (e.g., Gangemi & Presutti 2009). Ontology design patterns are pre-formed chunks of re-usable semantics that allow ontology developers to quickly compose an ontology for their needs. In this area, there is now a call for Spatial Ontology Design Patterns, which would similarly make it much easier for the spatial community to build and deploy ontologies relevant for addressing practical problems. Just what kind of patterns will be necessary and useful is an open issue for the spatial domain and this offers multiple possibilities for focused research projects that would interact strongly with the other research initiatives, adding in the modeling perspective that is the focus of this initiative. One direction to pursue this are the image schematic patterns described above. In addressing these overarching research questions, the PhD research undertaken within this initiative will contribute towards a deeper understanding of fundamental issues of spatial representation. Close interaction with the shared research challenge and the other research initiatives will further drive the development and evaluation of these foundations. In order to address the central research questions, the following list contains examples of more specific research goals, each of which would define a core research task forming the seed of a doctoral dissertation to be supported by the RTG. Some of these overlap with tasks found in other research initiatives, although here the main focus is on the spatial modeling required and its formalization. These points of overlap also serve as natural points of interaction across the research initiatives and could well be used to form interrelated research areas addressed in more than one dissertation. Modeling foundations of spatial activities and processes, incorporating issues of changes of location and spatial configurations (e.g., changes in the built environment);

8 Modeling foundations of spatial processes involving changes internal to objects (e.g., changes of affordances of objects or of the spatial distribution of objects); Providing well-engineered ontological components and patterns of core spatial entities (e.g., paths, routes, motion events, points of interest) that can stand as design patterns for incorporation and evaluation in applications and as exports to organizations (e.g., OGC, USGS etc.) where such design patterns may be of considerable utility; Providing vertical ontological models that demonstrate how different levels of abstraction, granularity and use can be effectively combined by translation and mappings of suitable kinds; Modeling and adaptive integration of changes in the environment based on partial and heterogeneous data sources to support spatial activities, such as navigation tasks or other embedded activities; Modeling spatial information sufficient for supporting selection and relevant visualization of the affordances of the environment for decision support; Modeling of, reasoning with, and integration of location information at different levels of detail and accuracy; Providing semantics for crowd-sourced information or link data sources for supporting seamless integration across knowledge sources; Providing semantics for sensor data for supporting seamless integration across knowledge sources.