Summer School on the Semantic Web

Last week, I attended the Sixth European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW’08). As the name implies (well, not only implies..), it’s a summer school on Semantic Web stuff.

The school promises a good combination of theoretical and practical exercises (ref. programme), lead by some of the top researchers of the field.

Although the summer school is primarily targeted towards post graduate / PhD students (48/50 were PhD students), and even though my topic for the poster session was Ontology Driven Information Integration and Knowledge Management with Topic Maps, I was lucky enough to be accepted

As you can imagine, when I arrived last Sunday, I was quite excited about what the outcome would be. Luckily, it was very interesting. Personally, I even got more than I expected.

Quick overview

The topics covered by talks and hands-on sessions included ontological engineering, KR Design Patterns, ontology alignment, Semantic Web Services, Machine Learning for the Semantic Web, etc. In addition, the program was packed with social activities.

Invited Speakers

The invited speakers included Guus Schreiber who gave an interesting talk about a project using Semantic Web technologies for information integration, semantics driven search (main objective, as far as I understood) and browsing of cultural heritage data. As you may know, this is partly what’s being going on in the Topic Maps community for years. Anyway … on the technical side; they were utilizing a subset of OWL constructs for inferencing. That is: owl:TransitiveProperty, owl:inverseOf and owl:sameAs.

Chris Welty from IBM Research gave an interesting talk on “Ontology and Folksonomies: False Friends”, in which he proposed a new definition of ontologies (versus “subject spaces”), tossing Gruber’s (i.e. “specification of conceptualization”), the OWL specification’s (anything expressed in OWL) and other definitions out the window.

Natasha Noy gave a speech on Collaborative Ontology Engineering, Evolution, Alignment, .. everything. The presentation was based on new features of the upcoming Protégé release.

Enrico Motta spoke about understanding ontologies, semantic search and human-ontology Interaction. The latter of which proposed an algorithm for extracting the core concepts, relations and instances from ontologies, from a human perspective (ref. natural categories). As far as I understood, they’ll be using the findings not only as a tool for users searching for ontologies to re-use in their own applications, but also in an effort to enhance ontology visualization in software applications. Quite interesting.
I also had an interesting talk with Motta later that day/night about Topic Maps, the Semantic Web vs. Topic Maps, etc. The fact that prominent researchers, i.e. tutors and invited speakers, were available for — and willing to — discuss with and advise students, must surely be of high value to all the PhD students that attended the school…

In additon, Mark Greaves from Vulcan Inc. held a presentation about Venture Capital and commercialization. Basically, it went like this:

1. EU funds research.
2. European researchers do not convert work into money.
3. Americans are the ones making money (off of the European funding).

Tutor Lead Talks and Hands-On Sessions

There were also talks by the tutors on ontological engineering, conceptualization and KR design patterns,  Semantic Web Services (not my main interest, but nice to have been introduced to the topic), ontology alignment and matching (again, nice to know of and try out), human language technologies and machine learning for the Semantic Web, etc.

Most of the presentations are available at the SSSW’08 site, but I’ll also write more about the individual topics in future postings.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:45 and is filed under Semantic Web, Topic Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.