Blog Archives

We Won!

by

So, in days four and five we man­aged to build a team (thanks to Helen): me, Rabeeh Abasi, Sofia Ange­l­etou, Aurona Ger­ber and Alta van der Merwe. We star­ted think­ing on an two-​day imple­ment­able pro­ject, we argued a lot on what a per­son needs when is trav­el­ling to another coun­try, and the solu­tion come at the bar (thanks to Asun, who chased us out of the school build­ing) where we star­ted dis­cuss­ing cul­tural dif­fer­ences — as we were a het­ero­gen­eous group: two south afric­ans, one greek, one romanian and one pakistani. In the end we decided to build an onto­logy that can model what are the social norms that gov­ern dif­fer­ent situ­ations (such as vis­it­ing some­body, court­ship, etc.) in dif­fer­ent cultures.

We also focused (and argued a lot) on the use of some onto­logy pat­terns, such as situ­ation, agent-​role and role-​task. We were on Sat­urday the second group to present our mini-​project, all the other present­a­tions had a sig­ni­fic­ant fun factor and imple­ment­a­tion plans, and couple of them had real pro­to­typ­ical implementations.

And we won! it seems that the com­plex­ity of the mod­el­ling effort and the san­ity of the open research ques­tions we launched did this. I’m per­son­ally still puzzled about it.

SSSW07 — Day Two

by

The invited speaker of the day was Richard Ben­jamins (iSOCO, Tele­phon­ica), about “Semantic Solu­tions for the Enter­prise,” he talked about the mar­ket, Gart­ner Hype Cycle 2006 pre­dic­tions, pub­lic and cor­por­ate semantic applic­a­tions and cost factors for con­struct­ing ontologies.

Next, Jérôme Euzenat presen­ted at a very fast pace, the role, state of the art and future in onto­logy match­ing and align­ment; and we got a taste of vari­ous match­ing algorithms in the after­noon prac­tical ses­sion.

Asun­ción Gómez Pérez, gave a present­a­tion on onto­lo­gical engin­eer­ing — devel­op­ment pro­cess, onto­logy life­cycle, meth­ods and meth­od­o­lo­gies for build­ing onto­lo­gies, and the tool suites and lan­guages that sup­port them. Most of the things were part of NeOn Pro­ject, the NeOn gloss­ary of activ­it­ies is a nice over­view of what onto­lo­gical engin­eer­ing deals with.

In the after­noon, another prac­tical ses­sion was lead by Aldo Gangemi, where we had to build an simple (and funny) onto­logy using another set onto­logy pat­terns than the ones dis­cussed in the pre­vi­ous day. If in the pre­vi­ous day we played with Protégé 4, now we designed the onto­logy with Top­Braid Com­poser. (I won­der what is the accept­ance within this com­munity of Altova’s Semantic­Works).

Later we had a extreme short walk in moun­tains, where we fol­lowed briefly one of the foot­paths of the Fuenfría Valley.