During and in between all the research traveling over the past half a year I also managed to write some papers. One of them is an invited book chapter [1] based on chapter 2 of my PhD thesis, i.e. the taxonomy of types of granularity with some additional material to make it self-standing to read. This book chapter that will appear in Novel Developments in Granular Computing (edited by JingTao Yao) early next year is to some readers, however, still rather abstract. To try meet feedback on how to apply these types of granularity and the TOG, I applied it and wrote a paper about using them to improve representation of granulation hierarchies in the subject domain of geography and ecology. This case study for representing semantics of granularity in Geographic Information Systems [2] will be presented early next year at the Geomatics’09 conference. The abstract of what I like to think to be a, from a potential user perspective, very readable paper (pdf) is as follows:
Dealing with granularity in the GIS domain is a well-known issue, and multiple data-centric engineering solutions have been developed to deal with finer- and coarser-grained data and information within one information system. These are, however, difficult to maintain and cumbersome for interoperability. To address these issues, we propose eight types of granularity and a facilitating basic theory of granularity to structure granulation hierarchies in the GIS domain. Several common hierarchies will be re-assessed and refined. It illustrates a methodology of first representing what one desires to consider for a GIS application, i.e., at the semantic layer, so as to enable reaping benefits of flexibility, reusability, transparency, and interoperability at the implementation layer.
A nice extra, for me at least, is that the Geomatics conference will be held in Havana, Cuba, as part of Informatica’09. Though I can understand Spanish and speak it a little (well, by mixing it with Italian), I do appreciate they are making it into a bi-lingual event with simultaneous translation Spanish/English. Looking at the preliminary programme (details online here soon), the following topics and people are already booked in: Oscar Corcho on semantics and the grid, Joep Crompvoets on spatial data, Michael Gould on data infrastructure, Robert Ward of the International Hydrographic bureau about marine data and information, several ISO representatives on various topics, and more researchers on open source geoinformatics, precision agriculture, managing remote sensing data and other topics, which will be presented by people from, mainly, the Americas and Europe (Cuba, Brazil, Chile, UK, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, among others).
For those of you who cannot physically attend—be it for financial reasons or due to the blockade—but would have liked to be there: you also can register as a virtual participant.
[1] Keet, C.M. A top-level categorization of types of granularity. In: Novel Developments in Granular Computing: Applications for Advanced Human Reasoning and Soft Computation. JingTao Yao (Ed.). IGI Global. (in print, not yet online—contact me if you want to have a preprint).
[2] Keet, C.M. Structuring GIS information with types of granularity: a case study. VI International Conference on Geomatics, 10-12 February 2009, Havana, Cuba.
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