More MTSR 2007 presentations

11. Oktober 2007 um 15:54 Keine Kommentare

The after-lunch session of MTSR 2007 contained five presentations:

Spyros Voulgaris presented a A Web Classifier for Semantic Classification Between News and Sports Broadcasts, that is an automated method of classification of news vs sports broadcast based on the properties of audio signal. The method does not require speech-recognition and is language independent. The audio signal is processed into a feature vector with is then fed to a neural network for classification. For feature extraction AMDF (Average Magnitude Difference Function) with segments of one to six seconds is used. As I do not know AMDF I cannot tell you more about this, nor what simple automatic binary classification has to do with semantics.

Based on classifier by Voulgaris et al. a Semiautomated tool for characterizing news video files, using metadata schemas was presented by Stefanos Asonitis. Their system consists of a web crawler for video content, the classifier, and an export of NewsML und SportsML which is partly derived from the sources and the classifier and party edited by users of the system.

For a scientometrics-lover like me Metadata Encoding for the Levels of Scientific Research presented by Nikoletta Peponi was highly interesting. Frankly speaking most of the schema is outdated (for instance the division into article, monograph, essay, and thesis), naive and incomplete. Whithout a set of examples and mapping to existing ontologies its pointless. But it’s an interesting beginning.

Sylvia Poulimenou (Metadata Encoding for the Documents based on the Rules of Diplomatics Science) presented an extension of TEI for diplomatics (the analysis and critical edition of documents to test their authenticity).

In the fifth presentation Mrs. Belesiotis talked about Ontology Oriented Support for the Teaching Process in the Greek Secondary Education. My knowledge of didactics is to low to write more about this, but the didactic of the presentation could habe been better then speedy reading the text on overfilled, too-many slides only. Maybe I just missed the point.

MTSR 2007 impressions

11. Oktober 2007 um 13:53 5 Kommentare

Although there is wireless all over the MTSR2007 conference place I have found no postings about MTSR2007 or MTSR07 so far, so I just summarize the talks in the first session I just watched:

Evangelos Sakkopoulus presented with Ontology-based Knowledge Acquisition through Semantic Profiling. An Application to the Cultural Heritage Domain a maintenance scheme for detecting the category a website may belong to for effective caching and client-side re-ranking websites in mobile applications. His approach is based on the observed browsing behaviour of „bursty cases“: a few web pages results’ categories are accessed frequently for short periods of time. Sakkopoulus uses the categories of the Open Directory Project (ODP), but the method could also be applied to other sets like the Wikipedia category system or library classifications.

In the second presentation Dimitrios Koutsomitropoulos talked with Ontology-based Knowledge Acquisition through Semantic Profiling about profiling CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127:2006) by refining existing and adding new classes and properties with OWL. With additional restrictions and refinement you can increase expressiveness and better match a particular case. Well – this is nice, but in my experience we do not need more complexity and details but less, because the existing data is much less homogeneous and detailed then ontology theorists dream of. CIDOC-CRM is important but real-world applications will rather use simplifications of it.

Gianluca Colombo presented a Reference Ontology Design for a Neurovascular Knowledge Network. He researched how phenotypes in distributed clinical databases can be described with methods of bioinformatics to aggregate them jointly. He admitted that the most difficult part is mapping existing data to one common ontology.

Finally Irina Astrova presented Rule-Based Transformation of SQL Relational Databases to OWL Ontologies. I cannot judge her work because I don’t not the current research in mapping SQL data to the Semantic Web (it is surely a topic that many researcher deal with), but it looks more practical and relevant then the other presentations because most data exists in SQL databases. The implementation QUALEG DB can even do both way (SQL to OWL and OWL to SQL) as shown in another paper of hers – you can get get the software if you want (they are going to rename it).

The lunch was simple and the view over the bay is wonderful.