España Virtual is a R&D project, supported by CDTI within the Ingenio 2010 program. It is oriented to architecture definition, protocols and future 3D Internet standards and is specifically focused on 3D visualization, virtual worlds, user interactions and the introduction of semantic capabilities.

España Virtual has as its aim to lay the foundations of a future Virtual ecosystemEspaña with multimedia content and interactive services, which group together the technology known as Web 2.0 and its social, semantic and geographical aspects (orthophotos, satellite image, digital elevation models, 3D buildings ...) into a new generation of 3D tools to interact with the virtual world.

For a more detailed description, please, refer to the Project web.

UPM role in España Virtual

The Ontology Engineering Group participates in the following lines of research:

Information integration

The UPM is in charge of processing the new algorithms concerned with geographical information, social communication, semantic collaboration, and the Intelligent Web. Thus, its lines of research are focused on:

• Implementing the extension of a mapping language and its inference engine. For further details, see R2O and ODEMapster.
• Developing techniques for the automatic discovery of mappings between an ontology and different information sources. The goal here is to develop a process that integrates different sources of geospatial knowledge.
• Generating geospatial Linked Data from different sources of information (databases). These sources belong to the Spanish Institute of Geography (Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España, IGN) and the Nacional Centre of Geographical Information ( Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica, CNIG). Thanks to this task, the Web is now being enriched with geospatial data of the Spanish territory. For further details, see Geo.Linkeddata.es.
• Developing a system capable of automatically performing the syntactic description and the semantic annotation of already existing non-semantic information sources.

Semantic techniques for virtualization

Within this area, the UPM is in charge of developing a semantic meta-planner. To carry out this task, it has followed the reference semantic grid architecture, called S-OGSA. The UPM is also in charge of building different ontologies so as to provide computing systems with the capacity of inferring knowledge. This capacity will also permit making more appropriate decisions since these decisions should be made according to a more accurate knowledge.

Social Semantic Web.

The UPM performs different tasks, which are focused on:

• Design and implementation of an algorithm that permits associating semantic entities to labels, thus improving the recovery and/or recommendation processes provoked by the lack of explicit and formal semantics in the labels generated within the social label systems. The algorithm can be tested in this address address.
• Annotation of different resources available in the Web (texts, images, videos, etc.) and enrichment of the results that were annotated with information from sources of semantic information found in the Web of  Data.

Participants

People involved of the OEG involved in the development of the España Virtual project are:

• Asunción Gómez Pérez
• Óscar Corcho
• María Pérez
• Luis Manuel Vilches Blázquez
• José Ángel Ramos Gargantilla
• Idafen Santana Pérez
• Héctor Andrés García
• Victor Saquicela Galarza
• Esther Núñez Vidal
• Raziel Armando Valle Miranda
• Mariano Rico

Publications and main results

Most important publications are:

• Garcia, A., Szomszor, M., Alani, H. and Corcho, O. (2009) Preliminary Results in Tag Disambiguation using DBpedia. In: Knowledge Capture (K-Cap'09) - First International Workshop on Collective Knowledge Capturing and Representation - CKCaR'09, Redondo Beach, California, USA.
• Ramos, J.A., Vilches, L.M. (2009) Conflación Semántica: Análisis de fenómenos en el contexto de los WFS. VI Jornadas de la IDE España (JIDEE09) Noviembre 4-6, 2009. Murcia, España.
• Vilches-Blázquez, L.M., Corcho, O. (2009) A heuristic approach to generate good-quality linked data about hydrography. In 8th International Workshop on Web Semantics (WebS'09) in conjunction with 20th edition of DEXA. Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'09). Tjoa, A.M.; Wagner, R.R. (eds.) IEEE computer society 2009. Linz, Austria.

The whole list of publications available can be checked in the following link.

Additional information

• Start date: 10/01/2008
• End date: 12/31/2011
• Global budget: 25.192.648 €

Job opportunities

There are currently no job offers or studentships available in this project. For offers in other projects or research areas of the group, please check in our job opportunities section.

However, you may contact Óscar Corcho to check whether there are any potential open positions in the near future.