Gahegan, M., Agrawal, R., Jaiswal, A., Luo, J., and Soon, K. (2007). Measures of similarity for integrating conceptual geographical knowledge: some ideas and some questions. COSIT: Workshop on semantic similarity measurements.

Knowledge computing has opened the possibility of representing and reasoning with knowledge about the geographical workd, which (just like with data before it) has in turn led to many further questions regarding interoperability, integration and conflation of such knowledge. In our research at the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State, we often find ourselves faced with the problem of reconciling knowledge captured from different experts, or mined from published documents and databases. Far from being a frustration, this work - for us at least - represents the intellectual heart of geography....

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Gahegan, M., Agrawal, R., Banchuen, T., DiBiase, D. (2007). Build rich, semantic descriptions of learning activities to facilitate resuse in digital libraries. International Journal of Digital Libraries.

This paper describes efforts to extend educational descriptions of learning objects to enable semantic search for suitable resources held within digital libraries and cyberinfrastructure, and describes some further advantages that accrue from the use of formal description languages (ontologies) to describe both pedagogy and domain content. These advantages include: semantic browsing and visualization of learning object contents, advanced search capabilities linking to several different online collections, easy extension of learning objects with external content added by learners and educators, and utilization of the many rich models of education and educational domains now available as ontologies. As well as conceptual justifications and descriptions of our work, we provide examples throughout to concretize the ideas presented, using learning objects developed for college-level education in geography and the geosciences. We conclude with some thoughts on the further possibilities that arise from the application of detailed semantics, and associated reasoning, in the pursuit of genuinely reusable educational content that integrates more closely with community research activities such as exemplified by e-science.

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Weaver, Stephen D.; Agrawal, Ritesh J.(2007). On the Brink: Using Visual Analytics to Explore Decisions Made During the Cuban Missile Crisis. American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2007

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a pivotal time in the history of civilization. Many difficult decisions were made by a plethora of persons having different backgrounds, motives, beliefs, and intentions—while under extraordinarily intense pressure. In our paper, we discuss an approach designed for exploratory analysis of the decisions made using ontologies and based in visual analytics. With customized software to support our work, we will demonstrate how the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded with a novel approach.

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Gahegan, M., Agrawal, R. and DiBiase, D. (in press). Ontologies of pedagogy and geoscience to facilitate sharing and reuse of educational resources. Journal of Digital Libraries

Agrawal, R.J., Peuquet, D.J.; (2006). "A Unified Task Taxonomy of Spatial Analytical and Visualization Operations", GIScience '06, Munster, Germany

Agrawal, Ritesh J.; .(2003). Space Time Analysis in an Enterprise GIS. UCGIS 2003

The spatial and non-spatial data is increasingly used in the disease ecology and ecosystem health analysis and management. The present state of spatial data management system and the currently available tools are restrictive in developing and analyzing complex models. Recognizing the need for better and efficient data management system and specialized tools, the College of Veterinary Medicine at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign initiated a project to build a central GIS data repository and develop specialized temporal analysis tools. This paper discusses the development of central spatial data repository and the temporal analysis tools that will be used by the College of Veterinary Medicine. This project is unique since it is the first initiative towards building the central database repository for the college research projects.

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