Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Second day at MTSR

It is already a week ago (conference blogging should be published immediately) so I better summarize my final notes of the MTSR conference 2007: Beitrag Second day at MTSR weiterlesen…

MTSR 2007 impressions

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.