Decadal Vision for Geoinformatics, GSA Denver

14 June 2010, 8:50pm

The GSA Geoinformatics Division is holding the “Decadal Vision for Geoinformatics” forum during this 2010 GSA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. The goal of the meeting is to discuss and identify ways to advance informatics-based solutions for research and education in geosciences.The meeting will be held between 1:00 and 4:00 pm on Saturday, October 30, 2010, right before the GSA meeting starts. The location of the meeting will be announced later.

The Semantic Web is transforming the role of the current Web from ‘carrier’ of data to ‘consumer and transformer’ of information and knowledge. The decade of 2010-2020, ten years after the Geoinformatics Division was established, will bring an era in which societies of ontology-based software agents will automatically collect Web content through Semantic Web services provided by diverse sources, process the information coming from knowledge bases and databases, and exchange the results with other agents. Geoscientific knowledge (a collection of true geological facts) is the key to unlock the potential and understand the meaning and significance of the immense volumes of seemingly unrelated data and information on the web. The Semantic Web technologies allow us to formally structure the knowledge in every discipline as a series of integrable ontologies. In the Semantic Web, the ontology-based agents will be capable of making many of the inferences about the information that geoscientists make if the information is supplemented with semantic knowledge (i.e. ontology) about the geological data being transferred.

The “Decadal Vision for Geoinformatics” forum provides the opportunity for the Geoinformatics Division of the Geological Society of America to prepare to meet the challenges of applying the Semantic Web technologies in our research and education.

Some of the objectives of the Decadal Vision for Geoinformatics meeting are as follows:

• Plan the structure and function of a consortium to facilitate and organize supporting, funding, and achieving the Semantic Web goals in geosciences research and education.

• Identify and define the types of the Semantic Web applications (ontologies, knowledge bases) and other applications (databases) for different disciplines across the geosciences.

• Set goals for the decade in designing, developing, and deploying a set of integrable Semantic Web applications for all geosciences disciplines.

Please mark your calendar for attending this important and defining meeting!

Hassan Babaie
GSA Geoinformatics Division, Chair

2010 GSA Annual Meeting

Geo: International