Information visualisation workshop

Invited talks

Beyond RDF(S): the Ontology perspective for the Semantic Web (Rudi Studer, University of Karlsruhe and ontoprise GmbH)

Currently, we are entering the process of transforming the 'first generation web', that is characterized by HTML pages and human processing of the Web contents, to the 'second generation web' or the 'Semantic Web' that aims at machine-processable information. To achieve that next level one needs means and standards not only for describing the syntactic structure of Web documents as offered by XML, but also means and standards for specifying the semantic content of Web sources. RDF/RDF schema offers a first step in this direction.

We argue that ontologies will play a crucial role in enabling the 'Semantic Web'. In our context ontologies provide a formal conceptualization of particular domains that is shared between people and/or application systems. Ontologies may be specified by languages that are defined as extensions of RDFS, as e.g. OIL, and may be supported by a 'Semantic Web' infrastructure that offers means for storing ontologies and for making inferences. Of course, sophisticated ontology engineering environments are required that support the construction, learning, reuse and maintenance of ontologies.

Ontologies are also the backbone for metadata management since they pave the way for the semi-automatic semantic annotation of Web pages as well as for information extraction from Web sources.

Interesting Links:

http://Ontobroker.SemanticWeb.org/

http://www.semanticweb.org

http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil

http://DAML.SemanticWeb.org/

http://www.w3.org/RDF/

e-mail: [e-mail],

URL: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS, http://www.ontoprise.de

Semantics for the wireless Web (Johan Hjelm, Ericsson)

e-mail: [e-mail],

URL: http://www.42forlag.com/Johan/whois.htm

Describing multimedia (Wolfgang Klas, University of Vienna)

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/dbis

Multimedia for the Semantic Web (Lynda Hardman, CWI)

A brief introduction to SMIL, and that as an XML based format it is ripe for integrating with semantic markup. (It already contains a number of elements for including metadata.)

Annotating within different media formats. Two things need to be described, the data-dependent part that is being referred to and the semantic markup describing it.

The use of semantic markup for generating hypermedia presentations (the thrust of our current research). What types of semantic information are needed?

e-mail: [e-mail],

URL: http://www.cwi.nl/~lynda/, http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo

Agents on the Semantic Web (David De Roure, University of Southampton)

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/info/people/dder

Business opportunities on the Semantic Web (Janne Saarela, ProSolutions, Nice)

see slide texts in Annex 1

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.cs.hut.fi/~jsaarela

Short presentations

On-to-Knowledge: Content-driven knowledge-management through evolving ontologies (Dieter Fensel, Free University of Amsterdam)

The Information Society builds on the convergence of information, communication and networking technologies and takes advantage of infrastructures like the Internet and the Web. The aim of the IST-Programme is to help to create a user friendly information society. Currently there is a large gap between the information needs of a user and the way information is made available online.

Within the On-To-Knowledge-Project we will develop tools and methods for supporting knowledge management relying on sharable and reusable knowledge ontologies. The technical backbone of On-To-Knowledge is the use of ontologies for the various tasks of information integration and mediation.

The application focus of On-To-Knowledge is the knowledge management in large and distributed organisations. This aspect of On-To-Knowledge is emphasised by three case studies in the areas of Organisational Memory of a large company, help desk functionality of a call centre, and the knowledge management in a virtual enterprise.

e-mail: [e-mail],

URL: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter, http://www.ontoknowledge.org

OIL: an ontology language for the Semantic Web (Ian Horrocks, University of Manchester)

Exploiting the full potential of the World Wide Web will require semantic as well as syntactic interoperability. This can best be achieved by providing a further represen-tation and inference layer that builds on existing and proposed web standards. The OIL language extends the RDF schema standard to provide just such a layer. It com-bines the most attractive features of frame based languages with the expressive power, formal rigour and reasoning services of a very expressive description logic. The re-sult is a language that is both intuitive to human users and accessible to autonomous agents, thus facilitating the development of the Semantic Web.

In this short talk I will:

1. give an illustrated overview of the OIL language;

2. show how the stated design principals are reflected in the language;

3. explain how OIL can form the core of a complete ontology development envi-ronment for the Semantic Web.

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks, http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil