This is the link for the internet site of the research commission. As far as I have understood it is better to pass through them before proposing an FNRS. The should provide a kind of support.

This is another example on the other extreme of building ubiquitous computing systems. Instead of providing people with portable tech, we augment the place infrastructure to react to people’s presence.

Sensing Places is a technologically advanced architecture and design firm that designs interactive narrative spaces.

These spaces are orchestrated such that people’s presence and movement drives the presentation of digital media projected on large screens or embedded in the space.

Here is the link to the Open Source City meeting held in Strasbourg on the 7th-16th of May 2004. A bunch of links and redirection to other sites. Nothing systematic and descriptive of the outcomes.

For the implementation of my project I was planning to use UML, Unified Modeling Language:

Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) helps you specify, visualize, and document models of software systems, including their structure and design, in a way that meets all of these requirements. (You can use UML for business modeling and modeling of other non-software systems too.)

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This seems to be a good drawing interface: Visual Paradigm.

My research angle is defined by the constraint of being into a technical school and the interest I have for human cognition and learning.
The field that seems to cross for my work are the following:

– formal ontology
– cognition
– psycholinguist
– computer science
– learning theories (CLCL)

Apache Xindice is a database designed from the ground up to store XML data or what is more commonly referred to as a native XML database. The name is pronounced zeen-dee-chay in your best faux Italian accent. …

The benefit of a native solution is that you don’t have to worry about mapping your XML to some other data structure. You just insert the data as XML and retrieve it as XML. You also gain a lot of flexibility through the semi-structured nature of XML and the schema independent model used by Xindice. This is especially valuable when you have very complex XML structures that would be difficult or impossible to map to a more structured database.

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Project OneMap is a long term effort contributing to the fusion of standard web technologies and geographic content, often referred to as the GeoWeb. We are conducting cutting edge research and development and deploying the results as services on the web.

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Today I have been reading lots of stuff concerning RDF and all sorts of XML dialects. The results of this surfing is that I found tons of projects that looks at ways to integrate a semantic geographical description of space and SVG. One above all, Jo Walsh’s spacenamespace is an attempt to build an XML/RDF Namespace to describe places and relations among them. She was using at the more general GML that she found terribly complicated, and I agree with her. This Namespace or the connected schema is in principle the ontology I have to build about the relationship among places. She came out with a description which is not so well defined.

To this extent would be great to make some readings on how to realise an ontology or a formal ontology from a philosophical perspective.

Most of the effort I could track on the internet try to build a schema out of the box, something that can be applied to many different cases, something that is defined once and for all. My approach takes a different direction. I am interested in the way people can define the relationship by themselves and how an intelligent bot can restructure the namespace on the fly to structure a dynamic representation of the relationships.

The mean by which this bot should restructure the namespace should be a combination of the user/group behavior, communication intent, statistical analysis based on different sorts of data taken by the system.

So, as the user live with the system, they are not just inputing data into the system, but their action, their moves into the city space, their communication defines new links and EVENTUALLY restructures the grammar itself of these relationships.

To find the algorithm of this bot will be the ultimate goal of my PhD thesis.

In addition the theme of the thesis will be the definition of Dynamic Resources Descriptor framework, languages able to be more accustomed to the variability of the human language and communication, able, to some extent, to support human argumentation.

The ultimate extent of this is not producing a machine readable version of people’s fruition of the space, but is to produce such model because in this way can be propagated and ultimately read and understood by other humans. But this is philosophy …

Carto,net contains a series of links to projects related to carthography, svg, map servers and collaborative mapping. Very interesting.

Finally an idea!
Briefly the research question: Is an autonomous agent able to maximize contextual spatial cues through building a semantic description of the spatialized communication between peers?

The idea is simple and builds on the bits of research project we passed by this last few months. We have people walking into the city space. Each user is using a mobile phone able to track their position, to provide a 2D map of the city space, and to offer some authoring functionalities. Out of the users’ interaction in the small group, an autonomous agent implements some methods (partially statistical) which translate the virtual objects into an RDF description. Then this semantic data can be re-aggregated on the fly by the users to retrieve useful information or to navigate the space. On the operational level, the semantic structure is used in combination with a script that regulates the editing rules and negotiation process.

To structure further:
1. collaboration model
2. system architecture
3. RDF vs. XML? Which schema?