Our objective is to conduct the foundational research to create a transformational, dynamic environment for pedagogy, knowledge building, discourse, collaboration, and research in GIS&T. Led by Professor Sean Ahearn (PI) of Hunter College, the Carsi Lab. team (Dr. Ilknur Icke and Tri Datta) created a core ontology for the field (BokOnto) that can be informed, accessed, understood and leveraged through various applications via a number of web services.
Our visualization tools focus on two aspects: (b) conceptualizing, designing and implementing visual approaches for representing and interacting with the existing BoK, and (b) conceptualizing, designing and implementing visual methods that demonstrate the utility of having a formally defined BoK.
Dr. Andre´ Skupin (CO-PI)'s team at San Diego State University has developed visualization tools based on the GIS&T BoK.
Also available is a GIS&T concept network visualization tool from the Carsi lab. at Hunter College.
For a person, which concepts in the BoK is he or she proficient in (to one degree or another)? For a course, which concepts in the BoK are being taught (to one degree or another)? Thus, any geospatial entity can be mapped onto the BoK as a series of weight relationships between the entity and each concept, the weight of each relationship representing the degree to which each concept is employed by that entity (e.g., the degree of competence of a person in that concept). We are calling this mapping a BoKScore.
Check out the BoKScore tool developed by Dr. Brandon Plewe (CO-PI)'s team at Brigham Young University.
The Persistent Virtual Environment (PVE) working group at the New Mexico State University led by Dr. Mike DeMers (CO-PI) is developing an immersive multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) based on the Jibe platform to allow users to interact with the BoK both individually and in groups.
A kiosk lists the ten BoK knowledge areas, and each of these areas is a separate panel that allows the user to teleport to a specific environment dedicated to that knowledge area. When teleported, they are greeted by intelligent agents (AI – based robots) that will answer questions and guide their inquiry process.
The goal of the BoKWiki subproject is to create a web-base interface for revising the GIS&T Body of Knowledge (leading to version 2 and beyond) in a way that encourages the involvement by a substantial cross-section of the geospatial community, while ensuring that the results are authoritative and reliable.
Dr. Brandon Plewe (CO-PI)'s team at Brigham Young University has created a semantic wiki page as a prototype for collaborative re-engineering of the GIS&T BoK
