I just lost all notes that I made in a Microsoft Word docx file with OpenOffice. It worked all times as I saved the file but if you close it you will lose them all! I still cannot believe that I again opened a docx file. Guys, there are tons of free and open office tools, and we also have a well standardized office format called ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) . Please do not force people to use just one specific, expensive, buggy, insecure tool from one company…
RGBLED, Color Management, and FireFox 3.5
Just a short note. if you are using an RGBLED display such as in case of the Dell XPS 16 and you get strange colors looking on your flickr pictures etc using firefox 3.5, you have to deactivate the new color management:
- type about:Config into the address bar
- search for gfx.color_management.mode
- set the value to 0 which deactivates the color management
… restart the browser.
Changing Your Mind – Why Not?
Just a short comment. I am always surprised when some people criticize others for changing their mind? Isn’t this what science is about? We should always be flexible enough to learn new things and then change our opinion. What was a right (whatever this means) decision and useful some time ago may be not appropriate in a new context some time later. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we should not try to go new ways or try to develop unconventional solutions for (old) problems simply because all others go the same route again and again. Following our intuition and believes and still being flexible enough to correct them through learning is a strength and not a weakness – doing things simply because ‘this is how things are done’ is.
As one commentator has noted, science proceeds by funerals. (Ian McEwan from ‘What We Believe
but Cannot Prove’) 
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Semantic Challenges for Sensor Plug and Play
We just submitted a paper outlining the challanges tiowards a semantic enabled sensor plug and play infrastructre for registering sensors and inserting observations at Sensor Observation Services. Attached is a link to our draft, I will replace it if the paper gets accepted (update: the paper has been accepted, see below).
Abstract The goal of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is the definition of web service interfaces and data encodings to make sensors discoverable, taskable and accessible on the World Wide Web. The SWE specifications enable a standardized communication and interaction with arbitrary types of sensors and sensor systems. The central concepts within OGC’s Sensor Web architecture are sensors, observations and features of interest. Sensors and their observations can be registered and stored through the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) to make them accessible for clients. So far, mechanisms are missing which guarantee a correct semantic matching between real world entities and the features of interest stored in geo-databases. The same applies for the matching between observations as sensor outputs and the properties of the features of interest. By taking a use case from disaster management, we outline the challenges and demonstrate how semantically annotated SWE data models and service interfaces support correct semantic matching. The result is a roadmap towards a semantically enabled sensor plug \& play within the Sensor Web.
Bröring, A., Janowicz, K., Stasch, C., and Kuhn, W. (2009; forthcoming): Semantic Challenges for Sensor Plug and Play. 9th International Symposium on Web & Wireless Geographical Information Systems (W2GIS 2009). 7-8th December 2009, National Center for Geocomputation (NCG), NUI Maynooth Ireland.
Reference Systems for Geographic Information: Gazetteer Slides
Attached are the slides for the Gazetteer class on June 29th 2009 as part of the Reference Systems for Geographic Information course. The slides introduce the basic idea behind gazetteers and discuss various existing and forthcoming gazetteers as well as the vision of a inked data infrastructure for place names.
Once More…
After our spectacular server & backup crash at ifgi in June 2008 I decided not to start a research blog again, but now exactly one year later I will give it a final trail. However, this time it will be more like a collection of news and links related to our project work and documents.