Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Second day at MTSR

18. Oktober 2007 um 18:46 Keine Kommentare

It is already a week ago (conference blogging should be published immediately) so I better summarize my final notes of the MTSR conference 2007: The second day started with the keynote speech Using semantics to enhance b2b integration by Jorge Cardoso. He reported from a survey about creation and usage of Ontologies – I hope he soon publishes the slides or a paper because there were too many details to remember. The second part of his speech was about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Webservices – all highly relevant but less new to me.

After coffee break Haibo Jia presented A new Formal Concept Analysis based learning approach to Ontology building. He extracted 2201 different author keywords and 107 different classification terms from 900 documents of the ACM, added stemming and used the result to create an ontology for query expansion. I hope to follow his work with extraction and analyzing author keywords and classification terms too.

I could not follow the following presentation Formalizing Dublin Core Application Profiles Description Set Profiles and Graph Constraints by Fredrik Enoksson although I would have liked to get to now Alistair’s work. Dublin Core Application Profiles will surely become more important in the future but this presentation did not help me a lot – maybe I was just inattentive because of my own presentation.

So I switched to another session and saw one of my highlights: Panayiota Polydoratou presented the project Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA). To prepare the establishement of an „Overlay Journal“ a detailed survey was held among researchers in the astrophysics and cosmology community. The overlay journal concept was already coined by Ginsparg in 1996: a peer-reviewed journal is organized on top of a repository like arXiv.org. The survery showed that most scientists are not interested in a printed journal but in quality control and copyediting. Everything else can already be done with the repository (which the asked scientists already use a lot).

By the way: RIOJA is not the only project to prepare and create an overlay journal. I found the JISC founded Overlay journal infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) and the Logical Methods in Computer Science (LCMS) which exists since 2005. Peter Murray pointed out that the blog TotallySynthetic.com and the digital library Crystaleye for instance can be called overlay journals. Looks like the concept of a journal is highly evolving (Wake up librarians! When will you finally start to collect weblogs? The Times They Are A-Changin‘!). Ok, back to the conference, I will later think more about Overlay Journals, OpenAccess, Science 2.0, OAI-ORE…

In the next session I saw Fredrik Enoksson with An RDF Modification Protocol, based on the Needs of Editing Tools. He explainded that usually RDF is stored in triple stores and there is a need for a remotely editing RDF. In the luisa project a remote editing protocol for RDF is developed and the existing SPARQL update language needs to be extended to fullfill the needs of editing applications.

Beside the low number of participants my own presentation went very well – I got two good questions that helped me to think more about an SKOS encoding of country codes. The slides are at slideshare and a paper will follow.

Finally there were also some posters – but no real poster session to find the corresponding authors of a particular poster. A poster titled Combining Collaborative Tagging and Ontologies in Image Retrieval Systems attracted my attention because of the topic, but it looked very drafted and the explanation contained several gaps so I cannot say whether it contained some valuable research or not. I think the basic idea was to enrich a query with additional synonyms and query a combined index of automatically generated index terms, controlled terms assigned by the creator, and uncontrolled tags.

Video recordings of the presentations will be published in the next weeks and post-proceedings will be published in springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.