SKOS | O'Really?

December 2, 2008

SWAT4LS: The Semantic Web in Scotland

Filed under: semweb — Duncan Hull @ 11:57 am
Tags: Albert Burger, Alistair Miles, Annotate, BioDAS, Christopher Baker, DAS, e-science, Edinburgh, GoWeb, Gudmundur Thorisson, Heiko Dietze, James Procter, Nadia Anwar, NESC, Nico Adams, Norman Paskin, OBO, owl, Phil Lord, Sconny Botland, Scotland, SKOS, swat4ls, textensor

Last Friday, the UK National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh hosted a workhop, Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (see SWAT4LS.org for the full details). Here are some incomplete and abbreviated notes from the workshop where there were some interesting people, paperware and software.

People and Paperware

Nadia Anwar presented a paper on Semantic Data Integration for Francisella tularensi Proteomic and Genomic Data. This described experiences of developing a system for converting proteomics data in Excel to RDF, and what the benefits were.
Heiko Dietze presented a paper on GoWeb: A semantic search engine for the life science web. Have a look at GoWeb query for the hexokinase enzyme for an example of the currently capability of GoWeb.
Simon Jupp presented a paper on Knowledge Representation for Web Navigation which described why the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) is sometimes a more suitable language for modelling knowledge than OWL and RDF – see also SKOS in the context of Semantic Web Deployment by Alistair Miles

70 people registered to attend SWAT4LS in total, many familiar names and faces, plus some new people I’ve never met before: (more…)

October 27, 2008

OWL Experiences and Directions (OWLED) 2008

Filed under: informatics,semweb — Duncan Hull @ 4:13 pm
Tags: ChEBI, GENIA, Ian Horrocks, ISWC, Karlsruhe, Michel Dumontier, OBI, ontology, owl, OWLED, Rafal Rak, SKOS, Strix nebulosa, w3c, web

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language for creating ontologies on the Web. It does exactly what it says on the tin. But what is an ontology? One way to think of it is as a better way of storing data and knowledge. Instead of just capturing and describing data in a databases, ontology languages like OWL provide ways to capture and describe knowledge in a knowledge base. Ontologies can allow more intelligent querying, integration and understanding of data than is possible using a plain old relational database.

Since 2003 developers and users of the Web Ontology Language, abbreviated to OWL (not WOL), have been gathering at a two-day workshop called OWLED (OWL Experiences and Directions). This year the workshop is in Karlsruhe in Germany. The full list of accepted papers is available, as with previous years, this years workshop has a distinctly biological flavour to the proceedings: (more…)

Comments (1)

O'Really?