Welcome to Tomi Kauppinen’s public defence of his doctoral thesis on Methods for Creating and Using Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web. The defence will take place on Friday 23rd April, 2010, at 12 noon at the Aalto University, TUAS Building (Otaniementie 17, Espoo), Auditorium AS2.
Download the dissertation (pdf)
Preceding the dissertation, the opponent prof. Werner Kuhn will give a guest lecture at the same address, auditorium TU1 at 10:15-11:00: Werner Kuhn: Sensors everywhere – but what are they sensing? Ontology and the sensor web.
Abstract: Sensor networks remain largely disconnected from the general web, sensor services cannot be assessed for semantic interoperability, and core notions of sensor technology standards remain ambiguous. In this talk, I present a sensor observation ontology addressing these issues.
It treats observation as an informational rather than technological process, relates observations to real world phenomena, separates symbolization from signal processing, includes human observations, and supports sensor fusion. The ontology is formalized in Haskell, the standard functional language, offering significantly more powerful modeling capabilities than, for example, OWL. An outlook will be given on how to deal with resolution and uncertainty, location and time, trust and reputation, as well as actuators and observation-action cycles.
Brief CV: Werner Kuhn is a professor at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany. He leads MUSIL (the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab), a research group working on semantic interoperability problems in the semantic and social web. Since 2002, MUSIL has been establishing foundations for Semantic Reference Systems. Werner has published on topics ranging from human-computer interaction through interoperability standards to geospatial semantics.