Blog Archives

We Won!

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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 Three

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This day’s invited speaker was Peter Mika, from Yahoo! Research Bar­celona. In his talk — The Future of Web Search — emphas­ised the state of the web search, semantic web deploy­ment dif­fi­culties, the shift from doc­u­ments to data­bases (web of data), and cur­rent trends in annotation/​structure of data: folk­so­nom­ies, µformats, wiki­pe­dia infoboxes, RDFa; then how to recon­sider IR in this con­text: folk­so­nom­ies min­ing, GRDDL and hGRDDL, should we have “for­giv­ing” pars­ers for µformats?

In this con­text the descrip­tion of the ideal world would be:

  • plenty of pre­cise metadata to harvest
  • user intent cap­tur­able dir­ectly as a SPARQL query
  • single onto­logy used both by the query and the know­ledge base (KB)
  • a query executed on a single KB, gives the cor­rect, single answer

In real world we face tech­nical and social chal­lenges: query inter­face usab­il­ity, data qual­ity (from synctactic/​semantic errors to spam), onto­logy map­ping, entity res­ol­u­tion, rank­ing across types, res­ults dis­play (inform­a­tion over­load and par­tial under­stand­ing issues), user motiv­a­tion to annot­ate, trust.

Next, Fabio Cirave­gna presen­ted the state of the art in using semantic web tech­no­lo­gies for know­ledge man­age­ment (KM) in large dis­trib­uted organ­isa­tions — from the sheer amount of raw data (i.e. a Rolls-​Royce jet engine pro­duces 1GB of vibra­tion data per hour) to unstruc­tured reports on the life­cycle (dia­gnose, repairs, etc.) of such engines, dis­trib­uted over multiple repositories.

The Rolls-​Royce case study of cross-​media KA was impress­ive, the main issues (apart of data volume) were that evid­ence is dis­trib­uted over dif­fer­ent media, from more or less struc­tured text (word, excel, power­point and PDF) to 3D images, data integ­ra­tion and hybrid search.

Other spe­cific inform­a­tion extrac­tion (IE) issues were event mod­el­ling, table data extrac­tion, dis­tance met­rics approaches (as opposed to the lin­guistic and stat­ist­ical ones).

Later in the prac­tical ses­sion we explored machine learn­ing (ML) from both (human) text annota­tions as well as image annota­tions; which also showed how easy humans dis­agree on annota­tions and how the annota­tions reflect the world model of the annot­ator (and not of the user).

The last tutorial was given by John Domin­gue, on semantic web ser­vices (SWS) — the prob­lems with the web ser­vices today, SWS vis­ion, IRS3 SWS broker, web ser­vice mod­el­ling onto­logy (WSMO), orches­tra­tion and cho­reo­graphy in SWS. Then the Essex County Coun­cil Emer­gency Plan­ning case study was presen­ted and demoed, and the talk ended with OWL-​S and semantic annota­tions for WSDL (SAWSDL).

In the afternoon’s prac­tical ses­sion, Barry Norton led us in how to re-​create the european travel demo with IRS3 and WSMO Stu­dio.

SSSW07 — Day Two

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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.