Representing and analyzing observed changes is a necessity in order to monitor and understand what happens in our environment, and to act based on this knowledge. ObservedChange.com is a platform for exchanging ideas, collecting projects and people, creating analysis mechanisms, developing vocabularies and tools for making this in practice.
The societies are facing huge amounts of changes that affect our life in both built and natural environments. Climate change, sea level rise, urbanization, changes of dynamics in cities—to give a few examples—all call for new ways of observing changes via sensors.
The big challenge of our societies is that these observed changes need to be managed and analyzed, and they need to be conceptualized to be able to represent the processes underlying the raw observational data. This conceptual level treatment of observations is useful—or even a necessity—in order to integrate them with other observations for understanding the real nature of changes, and to produce actions for dealing with the changes.
ObservedChange.com was established late 2011 by Tomi Kauppinen—affiliated with the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster, Germany—to create a community of people and projects around these ideas, raising in and around the International Research Training Group on Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information. The ideas behind ObservedChange.com are very related to those of LinkedScience.org, but with a clear focus on representing, accessing and reasoning about changes in our natural and built-in environment.
Please feel free to contact us at tomi . kauppinen @ uni-muenster . de for more information.