19. By accessing each web e.g. JAVA
service directly via it’s URL Regular Software applet
Accessed this way, the web Users Client embedded
service will return results as into an HTML
Jason, HTML, Text or XML page for
interactive
visualization
Regular user tasks
JAVA RESTful WEB SERVICES +
JENA FRAMEWORD
GIS&T Manager Apply
approved SPARQL
edits on the Direct
Web Application repository
(using JENA JOSEKI – SPARQL ENDPOINT Query
Requires admin Framework) Page
Feld expert
Employer
Job Seeker Live Ontology (LO)
Account to log in Triple Store (JENA – TDB)
Should allow
read-only
operations,
Store/ no update
Retrieve The triple store will store the repository queries
Relational DB Proposed (metadata and the instances). The ontology should be
Edits will be prepared using OWL and SKOS allowed
Its original mission was to provide a multi-path entry into GIS for a wide array of different learners at different stages in their careers and for different career paths.
Also meant to interact with, but not necessarily replace other disciplinary specialties. Suggested the need for additional education.
AfterDiBiasi’s entry, the first product from the effort. Published by the AAG and the UCGIS jointly
Divided the knowledge into 10 major “Knowledge Areas.” Not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some considered “overaching” themes
Each Knowledge Area broken into units. Each unit into topics.
Topics eventually parsed into individual learning objectives, with an attempt to incorporate behavioral indicators of success.
Also based loosely on modified version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.
There is also a need to understand exactly where the learning will take place. This is a basic conceptual model. Fairly traditional.
Interesting that only 40% of the universities responding had heard of the BoK but many still seemed to cover the major knowledge areas.
One effort to link the BoK to a competency based approach is the Geotech Center, funded by NSF and supported by the US Dept. of Labor
The model is far reaching and includes a high degree of non-geospatial content. Are GIS faculty responsible for non geospatial competencies?
What about the BoK? Is it dead? It is static, dated, and limited.
Foundational research is ongoing to develop a new platform to develop visualization and virtual environments in with to keep the next generation of BoK vibrant, current, and collaborative.
The ultimate goal of this project is, as this picture illustrates, is the development of the BoK2.
How effective was the coverage of learning objectives relative to content and Bloom’s levels.
In this section, we present the REST based web services and the visualization tools implemented by the CARSI lab.for the GIS&T BoK project. For the visualization applets, we make use of an open source graph visualization toolkit that is called “Cobweb” which can be found at :http://bioinformatics.charite.de/cobweb/We have modified the code to fit our needs. Currently, the “GIS&T manager” application that is shown in the architecture figure above is under development.
Following figure summarizes the proposed architecture for the GIS&T BOK application. The design contains two separate components: an information retrieval interface consisting of a number of simple web services and a web based application for those users who have edit rights to the ontology/repository.
Here is BrendonPlewe’s original visualization of the Body of Knowledge in total.
Here is Brendon’s model as compared to a single course. Note the white areas are those not included. The lighter the color, the less intense the coverage of the topic.
The conceptmap web service returns the concepts and the relationships between the concepts in XML format.The variable name “fromConceptLabel” identifies the source of the “relationship” and the “toConceptLabel” identifies the target concept. Currently, “broader” and “narrower” relationships between the concepts can be retrieved from the GIS&T BoK ontology.
The service also accepts query by a specific concept. For example, the followingcall to the service with parameter “concept” associated with “Data Mining” returns those concepts that are directly related to Data Mining either through “narrower” or “broader” relationships.In this example, “Data Mining” has 5 sub-concepts and it is a sub-concept of “Data Analysis”.
http://146.95.130.6/gistbokviz/conceptGraphViz.htmlThe visualization tool retrieves the concept map starting from a given concept, as in the example above. The user then has the option to retrieve other related concepts by simply double-clicking on a selected concept.
http://146.95.130.6/gistbokviz/moduleGraphViz.htmlThis figure shows an example where the user double clicks on “Data Analysis” and all other related concepts to “Data Analysis” are retrieved and visualized.In the figures, the direction of the arrows on the connecting edges indicates the “narrower/broader” relationships. The concept that is pointed by an arrow is the sub-concept (narrower concept) of the source concept.As the user keeps adding concepts, through double-clicking on the concepts, the graph might get more complicated and may no longer fit the window. The user can zoom in the graph using the “zoom slider” on the “display panel” shown on the top left side of the visualization window. Thismenu becomes visible as the user hovers over the “display panel” using the mouse.
Creating a new concept node by selecting the “Add Node” option from the graph panel.
This will create a new empty node as shown. The user then can enter the name for the new concept on the right hand side of the visualization panel. Once the name and an optional description are entered, the user can connect this concept to other existing concepts by creating new edges.
To enter a new edge, the user first clicks on the “source concept”, and then while holding the “Control” key clicks on the “target concept” and selects“Add Edge” from the “Graph Panel”. A new edge indicating the direction of the relationship willbe added to the visualization as shown below.The visualization tool also allows the users to remove selected edges or concepts via the “Graph Panel” options. It also allows the users to edit concept or edge labels and descriptions via the property box on the right hand side portion of the visualization.
ThIs figure shows the visualization of publications that are related to the concept(shown as a yellow triangle)“Organizational and Institutional Aspects”. For each publication the title is displayed and the author is also shown. The graph structure shows multiple publications of the same author on the same concept.As it is the case for all other GIS&T BoK visualization tools, the user can add/remove or edit the nodes without having the authority to have the changes reflected onto the GIS&T BoK repository unless they are registered as domain experts.
The following visualization shows the course modules that are related to the topic “Database” and the specific concepts that each module covers. Each individual module is shown as yellow box and each concept is shown as a blue circle. As it is evident from the visualization, one module is a set of multiple concepts and one concept can be covered in multiple modules.
Part of the current research process is to develop other more interactive visualizations such as indented lists…
Here’s the indented list in action
Or as a tree graph… in this case expanded from a single topic.
Or a tree map, that takes yet another visualization approach. Each of these is designed to allow people to examine the BoK.
Our original choice of Virtual Persistent Environment (PVE) was Second Life. Run by Linden Research our of San Francisco California it provided the 3D PVE team with substantial tools such as building tools, it’s own scripting language (LSL), and an enormous user community.
Within the virtual world we created a kiosk based on the ten knowledge areas of the BoK. Each of the topics is more than a label, it is a teleportation device that sends you to the selected area of the BoK environment with that expertise. For example, if you were to click on the Cartography category you would wind up here….
You represented by your avatar would teleport to a virtual room, a holodeck if you will, that has it’s own intelligent agent, represented here by a chat bot. The chat bot uses LSL scripting to 1. identify the presence of an avatar, 2. respond to the presence of that avatar, 3. ask if there is anything that they require. At that point the person’s avatar can begin asking questions, such as “what is cartography?” Using the Pandorabot AI hosing service, we conded correct responses to these queries which then are triggered by the dialogue and returned as text onscreen. These answers are short but often enough to pique curiosity.
For more detailed responses the avatar can type in public chat something like “Lookup Cartography.” That command triggers a web scraping utility rather than a chatbot. The webscraping utility searches the Internet and packages a short response. The source is typically Wikipedia which, of course is not always accurate. What is returned is a small paragraph with information about the topic. This is usually larger than what is coded in the Pandorabot service.
While we were able to complete these tasks there were several limitations of using Second Life that became evident, and forced us to reconsider the use of Second Life as the VPE for this work.
One major issue we encountered is that Second Life is a Prim-Based world and that limited out ability to dynamically change any of the content. For example Dr. Skupin at SDSU wanted an ability to change the size, shape, and even shading of a holodeck in Second Life to correspond to changing content in the BoK. To do this would require literally an infinite number of prims to accomplish.
The ability to use Multi-media in Second Life is limited by the rights afforded to particular parcels of virtual space in Second Life. It is also some work to provide multimedia within Second Life and we found no way to synchronize viewing for multiple avatars. While advances in Second Life have made multi-media easier to accomplish, the 3D world is not currently well suited to this.
This also suggests another issue we encountered with Second Life. The basic design of Second Life is that all interactions remain contained within the single user interface, although calls to external URLs can be accomplished within SL. Given the powerful visualization tools already created for this project, however, it made sense to discontinue our efforts at using Second Life.
Our change of direction was not a complete U turn, but it did require some re-tooling that we are currently doing.
Enter Reaction Grid. After searching for alternatives to Second Life I was able to spend some time conversing with Kyle Gombo,the CEO of Reaction Grid, an alternative PVE based on the powerful gaming engine called Unity3D and a multi-player interface Reaction Grid created called “jibe.”
Jibe is a collection of readily available but effective components that allow for the integration of Virtual 3D spaces and web-based spaces as well (e.g. facebook).
Examples of what this hybrid environment can accomplish includes the interactivity of the 3D in-game experience with the outside 2D experience that we are so familiar with. For example, in the image above the user is actually interacting with a 3D model of the HIV virus. That interaction, using sensors called “colliders” allows the user to pull up available information from websites (as shown on the right of the top panel). The bottom indicates how videos can be called by simply touching a 3D object, such as the space shuttle on the central panel. Additionally, one can simultaneously “tweet” about the experience as well.
In fact this hybrid system can even be launched from within a website or, as in this case, a facebook account. Moreover, this system will run on Windows, OSX, and UNIX machines in additional to mobile devices like iPhones and Androids as well as tablets.
The core of this, and the location where our revised environment will be built is within the Unity3D gaming engine.
We have already begun the recreation of the original exploratorium space.
The Kiosk is being recreated and we are retooling the chatbots and webscraping.
What is very exciting about this, however, is that the Unity building environment is considerably more robust and provides us with much more flexibility that Second Life. We are now working on linkages to the other pieces of this work so we can leverage those tools without having to recreate them in Second Life.
Additionally, there are sophisticated 3D builds such as this school that we have been able to incorporate into our exploratorium environment. With time such photo-realistic builds will be able to act as an appropriate metaphor for exploring the BoK. Ultimately, our goal is to use them as an additional portal into the Body of Knowledge.
The ultimate purpose of which is to allow us to create a collaborative, refereed, mult-purpose, and real-time GIS&T Body of Knowledge that will, hopefully serve many geospatial communities for generations to tome.
