musil @ Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010
We gave a talk at the workshop “Ontology Repositories and Editors for the Semantic Web” about our implementation of the concept repository in the Swing and GDI-Grid project. The other presentations covered, amongst others, the storage and access to the service repository developed in the Soa4All-project, the various tools provided by the Semantic Computing Research Group in Helsinki, and the ideas behind the semic.eu initiative. All was framed by two keynotes about the BioPortal and the Open Ontology Repository.
The conference itself had, as usual, its heights and lows. It started with a refreshing view on social networks by Noshir Contractor. I can only recommend to have a look at his talk once its up at videolectures.net. The other keynotes about smart (attaching an RFID-chip) products (Wolfgang Wahlster), semantic patterns (Aldo Gangemi), and SKOS (Sean Bechhofer) where also entertaining. Other talks where I can recommend to have a look at the papers:
- Incremental Reasoning on Streams and Rich Background Knowledge
- A Hybrid Model and Computing Platform for Spatio-Semantic Trajectories
- Natural Language Interface to Ontologies: Combining Syntactic Analysis and Ontology-based Lookup through the User Interaction
In general, many talks were in my opinion too focused on technology. RDF and its derivatives (OWL, Sparql, Linked Data) can be considered as core of the semantic web, and most research is apparently only investigating applications and extensions for these technologies. Other important research fields, such as data mining, logic and AI, or Web science were only marginally represented here. The spatial aspect seems to play an important role, but semantic web research usually neglects the complexity of this domain (i.e. spatial means lat/lon, nothing else).
On the other hand: the conference location (Crete) was certainly worth a visit…
