Tomi Kauppinen: Thesis on Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web

Tomi Kauppinen from the Semantic Compuring group at Aalto University is defending his PhD thesis "Methods for Creating and Using Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web". The basic objective of the thesis is to present and evaluate new methods for creating graded relationships for geospatial and temporal ontologies.

Werner Kuhn, Eero Hyvönen and Tomi Kauppinen
The opponent, prof. Werner Kuhn from University of Münster started by stating that many people think that ontologies should be used to model types or kinds and categories of things. In constrast, places like Helsinki are instances of these categories. He asked how did the defendant think of representing place through ontologies. In his answer, Kauppinen illuminated the relationship between categories and instances. Later Kauppinen suggested that RDF is better than OWL for representing graded relationships.