GeoVoCampMadrid2012

VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is influenced by BarCamp, although the emphasis is different. Whereas BarCamps are oriented to demos and presentations, VoCamps are oriented to hands-on technical work and practical outputs; any presentations and demos should be short, highly on-topic to the vocabulary development process, and limited in number, to leave plenty of time for hacking on new vocabularies.

VoCamps provide the missing social interaction needed for vocabulary creation and management on the Semantic Web: a space where members of the community can discuss the current issues related to vocabularies and semantic interoperability. Unlike Semantic Web meetups which typically take just a few hours and where the discussion focuses on a single presentation, VoCamps are two-day events that allow in-depth discussions and working in small groups.

GeoVoCamp is a further work on vocabularies  for geospatial data, and methods and best practices for publishing geospatial data as Linked Data.

The Madrid GeoVoCamp 2012 is planned to further work on the NeoGeo vocabulary. A potential further area of work will be generating LinkSpec's to help to map various open spatial datasets to each other (e.g., LinkedGeoData or geo.linkeddata.es).

Of course, and most importantly, the GeoVoCamp is free and open to everybody with an interest in geo-ontologies, spatial semantics (with and without geo), Linked Spatiotemporal Data and the Geospatial Semantic Web.

The Madrid GeoVoCamp is co-aligned with another camp in Santa Barbara, USA.

Further info about the event: http://vocamp.org/wiki/GeoVoCampMadrid2012

This event is co-organised by PlanetData partners.