Vespucci Institutes 2015 Meeting

Program for Follow Up Discussion of Topics from the Vespucci Institutes 2015 Meeting

Organized by Gary Berg-Cross (Spatial Ontology Community of Practice)

Prepared presentation material (slides ) Torsten's [slides] from the first session. Second session [slides] have been provided by Michael Gruninger.

Additional Resources See [Vespucci Institutes 2015 Programme,] Use the link below to get to recording of the meeting: https://meetings.webex.com/collabs/url/2yL-CXr45iGkEUYbNCYcWSSZhtiK0VBDPw0CvXV0Xjy00000

Prior discussion of spatial topics on the Ontolog Forum include: Spatial Extent of Abstract Entities? See http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2013-05/msg00263.html for a portion of the thread.

The Vespucci Institutes 2015 [Programme] this June at Bar Harbor, Maine

included several topics of likely interest to the SOCoP and Ontolog communities.

Week one focused on "Spatial Ontologies for e-Science"

Location often acts as an integrator in science, bringing together perspectives across multiple disciplines and scales. For example, health scientists increasingly focus on where patients spend their time, pulling a large variety of environmental and social data into their analyses. With big data and e-science, this trend has accelerated and gets increasingly supported through knowledge infrastructures and associated ontologies. Yet, it is often unclear how knowledge about location and other spatial properties should best be captured, and there is only a very limited choice of spatial ontologies. This Vespucci Institute will ask why this is so and why there seems to have been so little progress over the past decade. It will push the frontiers on spatial ontologies for e-science... (See http://vespucci.org/images/vespucci/2015/WEEK1_program_2015v2.pd for some specific topics covered)

In the first session in this series (July 8, 2015) [Torsten Hahmann] (University of Maine)

 presented a summary talk on Week 1 of Vespucci Summer Institute Spatial Ontologies in E-Science

In this 2nd session (Aug. 20th, , [Mike Gruninger] (University of Toronto) provides a follow up talk [slides] called:

The 'Thing about Location Is ...

Abstract Several ontologies for location have been proposed in the literature, and all rely on the distinction between some kind of physical object and the abstract region at which it is located. This talk will explore some possible ways of axiomatizing classes of physical geographical entities based on extensions of the location ontologies. Outline of talk:

Review of Location Ontologies
Abstract vs physical regions
Do different classes of objects require different location ontologies?
Reasoning about change and location

See bottom of page for Chat from the session.

Identified Participants

Alex Shkotin
Bruce Schuman
Dalia Varanka
Deborah L. Nichols
Gary Berg-Cross
Judith Gelernter
Michael Grüninger
Nancy Wiegand
Patrick Maroney
Steve Ray
Tara Athan
Terry Longstreth
Todd Schneider
Torsten Hahmann
Kathleen E Stewart (via skype) others may have been on Skype only.

Conference Call Details

Date: Thursday, 20-Aug-2015
Start Time: 9:30am PDT / 12:30pm EDT / 6:30pm CEST / 5:30pm BST / 1630 UTC

Call Duration: ~1.5 hours Dial-in: Phone (US): +1 (425) 440-5100 ... (long distance cost may apply) ... [ backup nbr: (315) 401-3279 ] when prompted enter Conference ID: 843758# Skype: join.conference (i.e. make a skype call to the contact with skypeID="join.conference") ... (generally free-of-charge, when connecting from your computer ... ) when prompted enter Conference ID: 843758#

Chat transcript from room

ontolog_20150820 2015-08-20 GMT-08:00 [09:29] anonymous morphed into Tara Athan [09:30] anonymous morphed into Gary Berg-Cross [09:32] anonymous morphed into Judith Gelernter [09:37] anonymous morphed into Deborah L. Nichols [09:40] Gary Berg-Cross: It might help to mute yourself locally on the Skype call. [09:41] Nancy Wiegand: Slide 3 should say 'location' versus 'place', shouldn't it? [09:43] Gary Berg-Cross: Barry Smith has a range of papers on Mereotopology http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/mereotopology.htm [09:46] Michael Grüninger: https://github.com/gruninger/colore/tree/master/ontologies/location_varzi [09:53] Tara Athan: From Varzi's functional relation and the reflexive axiom (that every region is located at itself), I conclude that everything that has a location is a region. Am I missing something? [09:55] Torsten Hahmann: It only says everything HAS a location and every region IS the location of itself. It doesn't mean everything IS a region. [09:57] Tara Athan: Oh, wait - I see what I was misinterpreting. The functional relation says everything has at most one location, not that if two things are located at the same place, then they are the same thing. So it is okay for two different things to be located at the same region. [09:59] Gary Berg-Cross: I think that the posted slides are one behind what Mike is talking about. So we see 15 when he says 16. [10:01] Torsten Hahmann: @Tara: correct. [10:06] Todd Schneider: Michael, shouldn't "Dierent classes of physical objects dene substructures of mereotopologies" suggest rather that the classes of physical objects haven't be defined well? [10:10] Nancy Wiegand: Slide 20 has to do with 'boundaries', as per one of Kathleen Stewart's grad students. [10:11] Tara Athan: I don't see why RCC has a unique countable model. I can see a unique *minimal* model as the closure of a finite set of explicit regions. [10:13] Todd Schneider: Michael, so there's an assumption that the presence of a physical object in a 'space' does not affect on nor modify the 'space' in which its located? [10:16] anonymous morphed into brs [10:17] brs morphed into Bruce Schuman [10:21] Alex Shkotin: Abstract space should be connected with reference system, imho [10:25] Deborah L. Nichols1: Unfortunately, I'll need to drop off now for another meeting. I'll get the rest from the recording or transcript. [10:25] Tara Athan: Gary: "The social aspects of location are related to its roles" [10:25] Alex Shkotin: 3D Geometry should be enough for location. [10:26] Bruce Schuman: Regarding physical boundary, what is the role of "latitude and longitude", which seem to offer a scientific/mathematical ground for boundaries in the physical [10:35] Todd Schneider: Have to go. Great talk! Space is the place. [10:37] Bruce Schuman: thanks for the comments on "lon" and "lat" :) [10:40] Michael Grüninger: Atomless Boolean Algebras, Chapter 16 in "Introduction to Boolean Algebras", Steven Givant and Paul Halmos [10:42] Terry Longstreth: I like keeping things abstract, but I couldn't help thinking that most of the interesting problems I've worked on were in 3 or 4 space. As Todd said in his closing "space is the place". I'd like to have discussions of containment, congruence, and disjointness in 3 or 4 space. [10:43] Terry Longstreth: Can't unmute, locally. just wanted to read my comment [10:44] Tara Athan: Just saw this link http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1227171&preflayout=tabs which suggests that uncountable models of RCC are "standard". [10:45] Torsten Hahmann: Halmos theorem states: "any two countable, atomless Boolean algebras with more than one element are isomorphic" [10:47] Bruce Schuman: thanks!