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SSSW07 — Days Four & Five

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On day four, the invited speaker was Dieter Fensel, who presen­ted “Ser­vice Web 3.0″ — from ser­vices ubi­quity (the milk bottle in the fridge becomes a ser­vice), what’s miss­ing in SOA and to how to bring to it the web prop­er­ties (scalab­il­ity, des­cent­ral­isa­tion, inter­op­er­ab­il­ity, open­ness, etc.). He under­lined the major break­throughs of Web 2.0: blur­ring the dis­tinc­tion between content/​service con­sumers and pro­viders, the move from media for indi­vidu­als to media for com­munit­ies and integ­ra­tion of human and machine com­put­ing in novel ways. Next he presen­ted the Semantic Ser­vice Bus, WSMO and MicroWSMO, and the semantic space: TripleSpace.

On day five, Enrico Motta spoke about “A Research Pro­gramme for the Semantic Web,” where he under­lined that the clas­sical prob­lem of know­ledge aquis­i­tion
(KA) bot­tle­neck can be solved by using the whole semantic web as an infra­struc­ture and also as back­ground know­ledge provider. The gaved examples were about semantic web back­ground know­ledge usage in onto­logy matching.

The rest of these two days were ded­ic­ated to the work for “mini-​projects.” Most of the meet­ings for these pro­jects employed more or less formal places, such as the pool and the bar.…

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.