I am a researcher in the UMBC CS department, working on Spire and AISL. Spire is about integrating ecological and environmental data (especially citizen science observations) on the semantic web; AISL is about sharing trusted information with the right (and only the right) people.
I sometimes data mine earth science data, space science data, and e-commerce server logs. I think there's a future in data blogging. Unfortuately, I only seem able to blog on Fieldmarking when I'm in the Laurentians.
You can reach me at jsachs #$&! cs.umbc.edu.
If you'd like to play tennis, I will try to have two racquets
with me at the following:
Upcoming
May 8-9: SciBarCamp (Toronto).
June 1-3: eBiosphere (London). Enter the Challenge.
Oct. 25-29: ISWC (Northern Virginia).
Nov. 9-13: TDWG (Montpellier).
Recent
March 19: Stanley Jordan at Blues Alley. Hands-down highlight of my review panel.
March 2-5: Practical Semantic Astronomy.
Jan. 5-9: UC Davis Information Center for the Environment. Publishing "Biological Inverntories of the World's Protected Areas" as linked data. What a hornet's nest.
Oct. 25-30: ISWC 08. John Giannandrea's keynote argued the case for "schema last".
Oct. 19-24: TDWG 08. I got stung by a jellyfish!
Sept. 11-12 : AISL kickoff. As it turns out, the intelligence and biodiversity communities share several problems. For example, the locations of protected species are important to a range of reseachers, and should be disseminated as widely as possible in the scientific and conservation communities. But the data is highly sensitive, and must not fall into the wrong hands (specimen collectors, unscrupulous developers, etc.)
Ancient History
July 20 : The Bio-Ontologies SIG at ISMB in Toronto. I still don't get their beef with multiple inheritance.
April 16 : Kenny Werner trio at Blues Alley. An amazing show.
April 8-10 : Intergovernmental/Inter-agency Cooperation on Ecoinformatics, Research Triangle Park, NC. More biodiversity content and focus than in previous meetings of this group.
SciBarCamp (March 15, 16) was amazing. I posted about it here and here.
Here are slides from updates on SPIRE that I gave at NBII, and EPA.
Microsoft may eventually post my semantic eco-blogging demo from their 2007 e-science workhop in Chappel Hill. The night before the meeting, I saw living legend Randy Weston at Duke University's Page Auditorium.
Some Publications
Lushan Han et al., RDF123: from Spreadsheets to RDF, Seventh International Semantic Web Conference, October 2008
Andriy Parafiynyk et al., Adding Semantics to Social Websites for Citizen Science, Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic e-Science (AAAI 07), June 2007
Tim Finin et al., Finding Data, Knowledge, and Answers on the Semantic Web, Proceedings of the 20th International FLAIRS Conference
Tim Finin and Joel Sachs , Will the Semantic Web Change Science?, Science Next Wave, September 2004
Joel Sachs and Tim Finin, "Indexing the Hidden Web", Proc. Of the First NASA Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, McLean, VA, Jan. 16, 2002
Hoban, S., J. Keating, J. Sachs, D. Laughlin & Y. Yesha, 2002. "Science Investigation System for Telescopes in Education Research", Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS36)
Suresh, R., J. Sachs, R. Pfister, J. Behnke, 2001, "Content Based Metadata Systems: A Workbench to Prototype Data Mining Concepts", Proc. Of the 2001NASA Earth Science Technology Office Workshop, Greenbelt, MD.
Joel Sachs and Olga Streltchenko, 1998, "Data Mining the SurfandBuy Virtual Mall", IBM Technical Report