Wed, 08 Nov, 2006
ISWC Conference (ISWC Day 3)
The problem with such a conference is that one spends as much time talking to other people as listening to the presentations. Great hallway talks, technical discussion, work… it is all good and important, but I always feel a bit guilty when I miss a session. Oh well…
I quite liked Tom Gruber’s keynote on “Social Web”. Tom tried to avoid the controversial Web 2.0 term and talked rather of the collective intelligence of folksonomies, tagging, blogging, etc. It was good to hear a talk that avoids the unnecessary controversy on the relationship between Web 2.0 and, say, the Semantic Web. Tom also talked about an attempt to give a more coherent ontological model for tagging, though it seems that this work is stalled due to missing people to work on it (see also an earlier blog he had on this for some more details). Would be good to pick this up…
The survey of the Web Ontology Landscape[1] was interesting. They survey a bunch of OWL and RDFS files trying to characterize them in terms of what level of OWL they use, what are the frequencies of usage of various facilities, etc. Although there were some criticisms on whether the sample they use was fully o.k., the conclusions were still interesting. Two things stuck for me: that a large number of OWL ontologies use a very “light” level of functionalities (which leads to the issue of having light ontologies and how important those are); and that a number of ontologies “slip” into OWL Full out of OWL DL due to some very small additional features they use. Bijan told me afterwards that if OWL1.1 were used, than those ontologies would remain OWL DL, actually, which is interesting.
I also quite liked the presentation of Fresnel[2], a language to express how one wants to see RDF data (a distant analogy is like CSS to HTML). The demonstrations showed by Emmanuel were really nice, and one would hope that more tools were at least testing this thing. It is really promising. I talked to Emmanuel later, by the way: it seems the IsaViz is one of the tools that does use this, though not the “stable” version at W3C. He said he would make a new stable version with Fresnel soon; we can then announce it on the SW Activity News page…
The same session included a presentation on /facet[3], a faceted user interface
to RDF data. It looks really nice, though one can really have a “feel” to a tool like that by trying it. So I hope to install
it on my machine soon to play with it (it requires SWI-prolog; well, that should not be a big problem…). The only
slight caveat with this project: I had to come to the other side of the globe to learn what Michiel & Co. are doing,
although their office is around 20 meters away from me at CWI… 
- “A Survey of the Web Ontology Landscape”, by Taowei Wang, Bijan Parsia, Jim Hendler
- “Fresnel: A Browser-Independent Presentation Vocabulary for RDF”, by Christian Bizer, Emmanuel Pietriga, David Karger, Ryan Lee
- “/facet: A Browser for Heterogeneous Semantic Web Repositories”, by Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman
