Semantic Web Days
2005

Abstracts

Keynotes

Ivan Herman (Head of Offices at W3C)

Questions (and answers) on the Semantic Web The technical public, when hearing about the concepts of the Semantic Web, has a number of questions. These questions might come as the consequence of misunderstandings, of inadequate explanations, or of a lack of necessary information. This presentation tries to collect some of these 'general' questions and attempts to answer them. Topics that are touched upon are: * is the Semantic Web 'Artificial Intelligence on the Web', * is this only a fancy research subject, * are there tools around, * isn't it too complex, * what are the still open issues, etc.

Hermann Friedrich (Siemens)

Semantic Web Technologies at Siemens: where are we heading?- scenarios and applications Semantic Web and its technologies are getting more and more important for industrial companies like SIEMENS. This presentation shows approaches within SIEMENS AG to integrate Semantic Web technologies like Light Weight Ontologies for optimizing business processes and improving knowledge management. It will also be shown how SIEMENS products and solutions benefit from Semantic Web approaches.

Openings

Massimo Marchiori (W3C, MIT Lab for Computer Science)

The Grand Challenge of Reasoning on the Web

Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA Rhône-Alpes)

Opportunities and Challenges ahead for the Semantic Web

Workshop "Industrial Applications of Semantic Web"

Richard Benjamins (iSOCO)

Semantic Web: out of the labs, into the market In this talk we will present concrete examples of applications of Semantic Web technology. We will discuss the main challenges the technology faces when moving out of the labs into the market, as well as types of markets with potential for such technology.

Juergen Angele (Ontoprise)

Ontologies @ Work - Experience from Automotive and Engineering Industry Besides the reduction of time to market, there may be observed another trend in the automotive industry: built-to-order. Built-to-order reduces the mass production of cars to a limited-lot-production. Emphasis for optimization issues moves then from the production step to earlier steps as the collaboration of suppliers and manufacturer in development and delivering. Thus knowledge has to be shared between different organizations and departments in early development processes. We present the use of ontologies for two main purposes: (i) representing and sharing knowledge to optimize business processes for the testing of cars and (ii) integration of life data into this optimization process. A test car configuration assistant (semantic guide) is built on top of an inference engine equipped with an ontology containing information about parts and configuration rules. The ontology is attached to the legacy systems of the manufacturer and thus accesses and integrates up-to-date information. This semantic guide accelerates the configuration of test cars and thus reduces time to market.

Anita de Waard (Elsevier)

Semantic Structures for Scientific Writing A new format for the scientific article is proposed, where a semantic structure is created by the author during writing. This requires the development of a knowledge model for such a format, the availability of authoring tools that can accommodate this model, and a browsing and learning environment tailored to semantically-enabled discovery.

Atanas Kiryakov (OntoText)

Recruitment Intelligence through Semantic Web technology The Jobs and Contact Intelligence (JOCI) system aims to extract job vacancy announcements from Internet. It searches the web and  automatically gathers information from about 150,000 corporate web-sites in the U.K. in order to maintain an up to date knowledge base of vacancies. This data is managed with a scalable high-performance semantic repository which allows JOCI to offer to its customers advanced search functionality, based on reasoning. The implementation is based on the KIM semantic annotation, indexing and retrieval platform. The approach employed in JOCI combines several techniques as focused crawling (FC), page classification and Information Extraction (IE) in the recruitment domain. The application uses an ontology, encoding the relevant domain semantics, for two purposes: (i) to support the IE process and (ii) to structure the knowledge base (KB) with the results and allow for semantic queries. The GATE text engineering architecture is used for IE.

Workshop "Vocabularies and Rules for Enterprise Applications"

Silvie Spreeuwenberg (LibRT)

Semantic Web and Business Rules, a good mariage? This presentation will give an introduction into the well established methodologies that are known under the name 'business rules'. Business rules are used in commercial environments to increase the agility of enterprise applications and demonstrate regulatory compliance. In the presentation we will also compare the business rules approach with the semantic web.

Donald Baisley (Unisys)

Semantics of Human Guidance "Semantics of human guidance" refers to the meaning of rules governing human activity, such as rules about operating of a business. Formally capturing semantics of human guidance is becoming increasingly important and the Business Rules Approach is becoming widely used. The presentation will demonstrate semantic formalization of business rules - how statements in natural language can be formalized into models of what they mean.

Workshop "Semantic Web Services in Industry"

Jens Lemcke (SAP)

Semantic Technologies for Enterprise Services In 2004, SAP announced its so called Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). Based on Web services and the surrounding standards, the ESA will bring the service oriented architecture paradigm to the area of enterprise applications. With standard Web services, the ESA currently has in common its sole foundation on syntactical standards. In this talk, we take SAP's ESA as well as the existing enterprise services as a case study for state-of-the-art enterprise software. We analyze ESA, identify current challenges and reveal its potential for improvement. Based on this elaboration, we present where semantic technologies, and especially semantic Web services (SWS), could beneficially be applied in real-life business scenarios.

Steve Battle (HP labs)

A Rough-Guide to Semantic Web-Services Like any destination we all know the famous landmarks, but maybe less about finding our way round the back-streets, which in this case are those bite-sized bits of technology that can be used to perform a few useful tricks. Of course, we'll take a guided tour of some of those landmarks (OWL-S, WSMO, SWSF, WSDL-S) and see where they stand in relation to each other. But we'll also explore downtown where semantics meet web-services and things start to liven up. Dr Steve Battle works in HP Labs in the UK, applying the semantic-web to Service Oriented Architectures across the company. He is investigating the development of next-generation standards that extend the existing web-service architecture and embrace the tools and technologies of the semantic web. He contributed to the Semantic Web Services Initiative, and recently co-chaired the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services.

Christian de Sainte Marie (ILOG)

A Web of Processes is a Web of Rules is a Semantic Web of Services In his talk, Christian de Sainte Marie will discuss the following assertions: - The next wave is the Web of processes; - Non-semantic Web services do not scale; - A Semantic Web without Web Services does not fly; - Business Rules, Orchestration and Composition are key to Semantic Web services.

Presentation

Hans Jürgen Ohlbach (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Geospatial Information Processing for the Web Enormous amounts of geographical data have been collected in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). They are mainly used for creating maps and as the basis for navigation systems. These data would be very valueable as components in a geospatial world model for Semantic Web services. Such a geospatial world model, however, involves much more than just GIS data. It involves geospatial ontologies, spatial reasoning on various levels, dynamically changing data etc.

Workshop "Semantic Web for Life Sciences"

Michael Alvers (Transinsight)

From Proteins to Protein Networks: Why a Semantic Web is needed for systems biology research Today's bio-chip technologies and high throughput techniques produce amounts of data which can not be handled by humans anymore. The need for software support is therefore out of question. For aligning activities a unified standard platform fostering world wide interoperability is now needed. The language to build on is doubtlessly the Semantic Web (for the life sciences). A semantic browser (environment) for linking web services, ontologies and text could be a first step towards a distributed (wikipedia like public) system enabling researchers to cope with the immense complexity of biological molecular networks. The way how to approach this challenging task is sketched including the topics of information extraction, knowledge representation and reasoning. A first concrete application design for a semantic web browser will be shown.

Michael Schroeder (TU Dresden)

GoPubMed, an ontology-based search engine for the life sciences Physics paved the way for the web. The life sciences may pave the way for the next generation web - the semantic web - which is suited for computers and humans alike. The life sciences have already laid the foundations for a semantic web by publishing masses of data online in XML and even RDF, by offering web services, and by developing ontologies as common points of reference. In this context, I will present GoPubMed, an ontology-based search engine for the life sciences.