Mapping the Wireless Revolution on the Semantic Web

Mapping the Wireless Revolution on the Semantic Web

By Jo Walsh
Date: Thursday, 24 July 2003 14:45
Duration: 20 minutes
Language:

The author has worked on a collaborative RDF model of london, with a
MUD-like instant message interface; this led her to meet other people
broadly involved in geolocation, mapping, wireless networking and
collaborative annotation/filtering. In particular, http://maps.nocat.net/
nocat maps, using open-source software and open data to map community
wireless networks in sonoma county, and http://www.noderunner.com/
noderunner, a wireless adventure game where teams compete to gain points
by scanning, photographing and connecting to wireless networks within a
set time.

A game of 'noderunner' was held in london on May 15th. The teams'
photographs of and co-ordinates for open nodes locations, GPS waypoint
logs and net scanner traces are available. The talk discusses the
construction of an annotated spatial model in RDF from these different
data sources; the use of FOAF and other semantic web vocabularies; the
augmentation of the model using other RDF interfaces on the web.

There are some SVG projections of the game, which the author would like to
see as the start of a process of building a collaborative map, annotated
with points and information about classes of things in the world, like
open wireless nodes and friendly pubs. The map can be overlaid with
point-sets from other web sites which offer geopositioning information in
RSS/RDF, like openguides [http://openguides.org]

All the development and interfaces are done in perl.
There is more detail about the spatial and wireless modelling in RDF here:
http://space.frot.org/talks/noderunner_rdf.html