Placeopedia = Google Earth + Wikipedia

You all waited for it, here it is : connecting the most amazing geographical interface Google Earth with the ever-growing Wikipedia. Go to Placeopedia, pick an article in Wikipedia, find the place of the thing on Google Maps, and pinpoint it. And that's it. You got a cool Wikipedia + Google Earth subject indicator. Just added the Very Large Telecope and Parañal Observatory. Better choose the "satellite" view to see something in those places, though, and don't look for accomodations around, they are sparse ... After that, add Placeopedia data to Google Earth, and see new added objects in real time. Awesome!

[2015-02-23] Yet another dead project ...

Semantics@ IVOA Forum

I've already mentioned IVOA here a while ago. I've jumped since a few days in a lively debate on IVOA semantics forum, including this thread, where ontological status of observation, event, object, etc. are discussed in-depth. As already mentioned, definition, identification and classification of an unbound quantity of "objects", among the tremendous flow of data carried by all wavelenghts of light over distances ranging from a few kilometers to billions of light-years, and captured by so many instruments and stored in so many data bases ... is one of the widest, oldest and most fascinating challenges in Knowledge Management. Not to mention the task of making sense of all that stuff put together ...

Identification in Big Science

Quite opposite to the friendly tagging we've been considering lately, Big Science projects are heading towards carefully engineered categorization and identification frameworks, aiming at interoperability and sharing of raw data. In Astronomy I've already mentioned here (and if not, I should have done so long ago) the International Virtual Observatory Alliance which has defined a standard format for identifiers.

An IVOA Identifier is a globally unique name for a resource. This name can be used to retrieve a unique description of the resource from an IVOA-compliant registry. This document describes the syntax for IVOA identifiers as well as how they are created. An IVOA identifier has two separable components that can appear in two equivalent formats: an XML-tagged form and a URI-compliant form. The syntax has been defined to encourage global-uniqueness naturally and to maximize the freedom of resource providers to control the character content of an identifier.

In Life Sciences domain, the Object Management Group proposes Life Science Identifiers Specification.

This specification addresses the need for a standardized naming schema for biological entities in the Life Sciences domains, the need for a service assigning unique identifiers complying with such naming schema, and the need for a resolving service that specifies how to retrieve the entities identified by such naming schema from repositories.

Interestingly, LSID uses urn schemes, but specifies resolving mechanisms.

The More Things Change, The More They Are the Same

Jack forwarded me last week an intriguing message from Chris Landauer, from some non-public forum, dealing with identity and undecidability.

"Another question came up about recognizing when two objects are the same. Since that question is formally undecidable even in polynomial expressions over the integers (Hilbert's 10th problem), I don't see it as being possible in the more complicated spaces of computing systems (...) without some kind of "cheating", to use the usual mathematical parlance.

In this case, one useful kind of cheating is to provide some very carefully engineered introspective processes that let the computing objects help to analyze and combine themselves with others. This notion of "Computational Reflection'' is one of the main principles that underlie Kirstie Bellman's and my theoretical computing research, which has shown that we can build such computing systems"

A quick search about Launder and Bellman led me to a very rich list of publications .

But further searching for "identity + undecidable", I stumbled on this amazing paper written in early Web days (Oct '93) by Henry G. Baker. Although written for the context of distributed computing, quite technical, dealing in-depth with various flavours of identity/equality of objects in object-oriented languages such as LISP, many excerpts of the paper make sense even for the non-programmer:

"Our model for object identity is similar to the concept of "operational identity", in which objects which behave the same should be the same."

Of course, to behave supposes a context of behaviour ... this conforts me in the line of thought that there is no identity, only identification process.

Identification + Classification = GAIA

With no surprise, the first Google hit for 'Identification + Classification' is about Astronomy. http://www.mpia-hd.mpg.de/GAIA/

The GAIA project is aiming at identifying and classifying over 10^9 light sources, sorting them in stars, solar system objects, galaxies, quasars and the like. Astronomers have always led the way in classification and inventories. This is the next step ...