GCI: Past, Present, Future

In Yang et al’s (2010) article they explore the diverse and growing field of Geospatial Cyberinfrasturctures (GCI).  Full disclosure, I had a very vague idea of what to expect when sitting down to read this paper.  When I first saw the word “cyberinfrastructure” I envisioned the entire Internet in the form of a city very reminiscent of the 90’s TV show ReBoot.   I could not explicitly define what CI was let alone a GCI, and I’m still not sure I could give a meaningful definition, as this paper was a tad-bit onerous. That said I also did not expect to be able to connect a myriad of topics addressed in class (as well as my own project research) to such an unfamiliar word.

 

One recurring theme is that of ‘interoperability’, which I generally understand as the idea that what ever it is you are doing it should be managed in a way that people from other domains of research have the potential to use it (effectively expanding the amount of data available).  This can be implemented in many ways from data technologies to interfaces for exchange.  In my own research I am reading up on sematic interoperability, mentioned briefly in this article, along with the geospatial semantic web.  Yang et al brought up a very important aspect of the geospatial semantic web that I have yet to give much thought—the problem of temporality.  That is, semantics change with time as does human understanding and knowledge and GCI’s must account for this.  But how do they do it?  I know than from a geospatial ontological perspective, formal geospatial domain ontologies are only formed on a need basis by a collection of specialists over a relatively short period of time.  They are very meticulously constructed and I can’t imagine an ‘update’ being applied to them semi-regularly.  More general geospatial ontologies are constructed in a way such that they are interoperable across many domains—would these hold up to the test of time? What is the geospatial sematic web going to look like in 50 years? 100 years (assuming the internet still exists)?  This has given me another subject to look into out of curiosity as well as applicability for when I begin to construct my own geospatial ontology.

 

-BannerGrey

 

Comments are closed.