OASDA 2016 - Ontological Approaches to Sensor Data Analysis

Questions about what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen are important for individuals, organizations, and society. Sensors everywhere can help to answer these questions, but sensors themselves only record what is (for instance what is the value for water flow, or freeway traffic load, or pathogen count) at any given time. They do not record what is happening ? that is they do not tell us what events are or have been or will be taking place. Interpreting sensor data in terms of event descriptions that make sense for different types of users has accordingly become a key research challenge.
So far ontological studies in event inference have made good progress in software architectures and tools, but the field still lacks good supporting theories. The central topic of the meeting is: how can ontologies support analysis of sensor data. Another aim of the meeting is to create a representative survey of all state-of-the-art approaches to the event inference problem. The subtopics include but not limited to:
- inferencing event descriptions from sensor data using either natural language (narrative descriptions) or formal language or a combination of both.
- event localization and event identification.
- using sensor data to enhance and validate event descriptions (including events in the past)
- using sensor data to predict events in the future.
- the role of sensor data analysis in areas such as environmental modeling and forecasting, criminal intelligence, monitoring of large-scale social actions.
- fusion of sensor data with soft data deriving from human observations and social media.
Important Dates:
Two-page abstract due: February 1, 2016.
Notice of acceptance after April 20: February 20, 2016
Registration opens: February 1, 2016.
Early Bird registration ends: April 20, 2016.
Registration and Hotel costs:
Early bird registration: $125 faculty, $70 students.
Late registration: $150 faculty, $90 students.
Standard two Queen beds room (Ramada Inn) $79
Single King bed room $89
Organizing Committee:
Barry Smith, Ling Bian, David Mark, Scott Mackay, NCGIA-Buffalo
Werner Kuhn, NCGIA-UCSB
Kate Beard, Harlan Onsrud, Max Egenhofer, NCGIA-Maine
Erik Thomsen, Charles River Analytics
Further details of the conference can be found at: http://ncgia.buffalo.edu/OntologyConference/index....
Please share this message to those you think might be interested in the conference.
-Ling Bian
Director, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at Buffalo (NCGIA-Buffalo)