[VoCamp Discuss] Introduction, topics of interest

Mon Sep 22 14:04:22 PDT 2008

Hi Matthias,

Many thanks for your introduction to the list, and your encouragement
to others to do the same ;)

(and sorry I didn't reply earlier - was on the road and swamped by email)

These are really interesting topics, which I'm sure will resonate with
many people at VoCamp.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Tom.

2008/9/17 Matthias Samwald <samwald at gmx.at>:
> Dear VoCamp participants,
>
> My name is Matthias Samwald, I am currently working for the Semantic Web
> Company [1] in Vienna, Austria, and for DERI Galway [2] in Ireland. I have a
> background in biomedical research (my master thesis concerned  brain
> research and synapse formation) and in the field of applied Semantic Web
> technology (my doctoral thesis was focused on using RDF/OWL for biomedical
> research). I am a participant of the W3C Interest Group for Semantic Web in
> Health Care and Life Science [3][4][5]. While my background is biomedical
> research, I am interested in applying Semantic Web technology in all areas
> of technology, business and science.
>
> Here are some topics which I would like to address at the VoCamp Oxford.
> Some of them are oriented on use-cases from the "KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki"
> project [6], which also includes industrial partners such as Sun
> Microsystems. Others are more driven by needs of biomedical research. My
> topics of main interest are:  1) Associative Tags; 2) Agreement,
> Disagreement, discourse; 3) Corporate Semantic Web, 4) "Are upper level
> ontologies/vocabularies not so bad after all?", 5) " Cleaner schemas and
> ontologies". Details below.
>
>
> __Associative Tags__
> Tagging is one of the key components of the 'Web 2.0', and Semantic Web
> technologies will help to make tagging even more powerful. Schemas such as
> SCOT or MOAT have already been established, and make it possible to 'tag'
> not only with simple strings, but with entities. These entities (such as
> concepts described in SKOS) can be associated with clear semantics and can
> be further described with RDF statements, to describe hierarchies of
> entities, or to link entities to rich data sources such as DBpedia. This
> enables sophisticated data-integration and cross-data source queries that
> would not have been able with simple, string-based tags.
> On the other hand, Semantic Web developers can learn from the simplicity
> that has made tagging so successful. Creating useful tags is very simple,
> and good user interfaces can further improve the simplicity of creating
> useful tag with feature such as autocompletion and tag recommendation. This
> simplicity should server as a role model for many Semantic Web applications.
>
> Specifically, I am interested in what I call 'associative tags', bundles of
> tags/entities/concepts that can be used for the simple representation of
> facts. The primary intention of creating aTags is not the categorization of
> the document, but the representation of the key facts inside the document.
> Key facts in the biomedical domain might be, for example,
> "Protein A interacts with protein B" (which can be represented with an aTag
> comprising of the three entities "Protein A", "Molecular interaction" and
> "Protein B") or
> "Overexpression of protein A in tissue B is the cause of disease C" (an aTag
> comprising of the four entities "Overexpression", "Protein A", "Tissue B"
> and "Disease C").
> Once the aTags from these different sources are aggregated, it is possible
> to pose a query such as "show me molecules that are associated with
> molecules that are associated with disease C", yielding "protein A" as an
> answer. Hierachies (in the form of rdfs:subClassOf and skos:narrower) can be
> used to expand queries based on background knowledge (e.g., that "disease D"
> is a subclass of "disease C").
> In many cases (especially with some ontologies in the biomedical domain),
> creating such associative tags can be much simpler than the creation of
> 'real' statements, i.e., relations between individuals and property
> restrictions of classes.
> I would like to present these ideas in more detail, get feedback, and
> discuss possible alignment of these ideas with ontologies such as SCOT.
>
>
> __Agreement, Disagreement, discourse__
> Many people in the Semantic Web community are interested in the
> representation of argumentation structures on the web. For example: stating
> that one snippet of text contains statements that are in disagreement with
> another snippet of text, which is in agreement with yet another snippet of
> text. This can be of use for many knowledge domains, such as news articles
> or biomedical publications. Of special interest in this context are
> extensions of established schemas, especially SIOC. There is also another
> ontology called SWAN that is specifically tailored to the biomedical domain,
> and efforts to align SWAN with SIOC have started recently [7].
> I am interested in applying such technologies both for biomedical research
> and for corporate Semantic Wikis.
>
>
> __Corporate Semantic Web__
> As Semantic Web technologies are finally getting mature enough to allow
> industrial uptake, it is becoming clear that ontologies for describing
> organization structures and business processes are still lacking maturity.
> FOAF allows us to represent basic information about persons, organizations
> and their relationships, but lacks vocabulary for stating that one person is
> the boss of another person, that a project consists of several subtasks, et
> cetera. While there are some small projects that try to create such
> schemas/ontologies, a solution of widespread acceptance does not seem to be
> in sight at the moment.
> It would be great if we could collect and review ongoing efforts and try to
> identify possible steps towards creating schemas/ontologies that can be used
> in corporations.
>
>
> __Are upper level ontologies/vocabularies not so bad after all?__
> FOAF seemingly tried it a long time ago -  foaf:Person is a subclass of,
> "http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Person", foaf:Document
> "http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Document" and so on. Linking to external
> schemas/ontologies (or making use of their classes and properties directly)
> can definitly help in facilitating semantic interoperability. For a long
> time, many web developers were very skeptical about such 'top-down'
> approaches of data integration, but recently the recognition of the
> potential values of such resources seems to be increasing. In parallel, the
> recent 1-2 years brought us some very large upper ontologies that are
> available as linked data, such as:
>
> Wordnet 2.0, hosted by the W3C
> Yago/DBpedia
> OpenCyc (now with new URIs)
> UMBEL (derived from OpenCyc and others).
>
> I think the practice of re-using and linking to such upper ontologies should
> become popular (again). It helps in creating a highly interlinked Semantic
> Web, and helps us to avoid re-inventing the wheel for each new
> schema/ontology.
> We could discuss the pros and cons of current upper ontologies available as
> linked data, and also discuss if they could server a more important role for
> schema/ontology developers in the future.
>
>
> __Cleaner schemas and ontologies__
> Working with established ontologies and schemas in ontology editors can be a
> chore. Most have dependencies on other ontologies, but don't use
> owl:imports. Most use an awkward mix of OWL statements and RDF(S), resulting
> in ontologies that are OWL Full. Many require some OWL reasoning to make use
> of sameAs statements and inverse properties, but at the same time reasoning
> is complicated because the ontologies are OWL Full or even contain logical
> inconsistencies. Often enough, there seems to be no practical reason for the
> design choices that caused the trouble: some minor changes can turn a messy
> OWL Full ontology into an OWL lite or OWL DL ontology. At the moment, many
> different working groups have created local versions of schemas such as FOAF
> or Dublin Core that are valid OWL-DL to fix that problem.
> It doesn't have to be this way.
> Trying to adhere to OWL lite/DL and adding owl:imports statements can help
> building cleaner,  modular and more sustainable ontologies, and does not
> require significant additional effort during the creation of ontologies.
> Maybe we can find a consensus that this would be a worthwhile goal, and
> develop plans towards reaching that goal.
>
> [1] http://www.semantic-web.at/
> [2] http://deri.ie
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/
> [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/hcls-kb/
> [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/hcls-senselab/
> [6] http://wiki.kiwi-project.eu/
>
> Cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
> Semantic Web Company, Austria // DERI Galway, Ireland
>
> P.S.: This mailing list has been quite silent so far. Are all participants
> of VoCamp subscribed by now? I think that exchanging some ideas before the
> actual meeting starts is very important! Please introduce yourself and your
> plans!
>
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