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Semantics for the Rest of Us -- Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World

Held in conjunction with 18th Int. World Wide Web Conference (WWW 09)
April 21, 2009, Madrid, Spain

This workshop has been postponed to ISWC 2009

Objectives

The Semantic Web is a broad vision of the future of personal computing, emphasizing the use of sophisticated knowledge representation as the basis for end-user applications' data modeling and management needs. Key to the pervasive adoption of Semantic Web technologies is a good set of fundamental "building blocks" - the most important of these are representation languages themselves. W3C's standard languages for the Semantic Web, RDF and OWL, have been around for several years; instead of strict standards compliance, we see "variants" of these languages emerge in applications, often tailored to a particular application's needs. These variants are often either subsets of OWL or supersets of RDF, typically with fragments OWL added. Extensions based on rules, such as SWRL and N3 logic, have been developed as well as enhancements to the SPARQL query language and protocol (http://esw.w3.org/topic/SPARQL/Extensions).

In this workshop we will explore the landscape of RDF, OWL and SPARQL variants, specifically from the standpoint of "real-world semantics". Are there commonalities in these variants that might suggest new standards or new versions of the existing standards? We hope to identify common requirements of applications consuming Semantic Web data and understand the pros and cons of a strictly formal approach to modeling data versus a "scruffier" approach where semantics are based on application requirements and implementation restrictions.

The workshop will encourage active audience participation and discussion and will include a keynote speaker as well as a panel moderated by Jim Hendler.

Topics of interest

Our main topics of interest include but are not limited to
  • Real world applications that use (variants of) RDF, OWL, and SPARQL
  • Use cases for different subsets/supersets of RDF, OWL, and SPARQL
  • Extensions of SWRL and N3Logic
  • RIF dialects
  • How well do the current Semantic Web standards meet system requirements ?
  • Real world ``semantic'' applications that use other structured representations (XML, JSON)
  • Alternatives to RDF, OWL or SPARQL
  • Are ad hoc subsets of SW languages leading to problems?
  • What level of expressive power does the Semantic Web need?
  • Does the Semantic Web require languages based on formal methods ?
  • How should standard Semantic Web languages be designed ?

Organizers

Program Committee

  • Melliyal Annamalai, Oracle
  • Dave Beckett, Yahoo
  • Kendall Clark, Clark & Parsia
  • Richard Cyganiak, DERI
  • Lee Feigenbaum, Cambridge Semantics
  • Tim Finin, UMBC
  • Yolanda Gil, ISI
  • Benjamin Grosof, Vulcan
  • R. V. Guha, Google
  • Pascal Hitzler, University of Karlsruhe
  • Ivan Herman, W3C
  • David Huynh, Freebase
  • Lalana Kagal, MIT
  • Ora Lassila, Nokia
  • Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oxford University
  • Peter Mika, Yahoo
  • Natasha Noy, Stanford
  • Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester
  • Yun Peng, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Marwan Sabbouh, Mitre & Northeastern
  • Lynn Andrea Stein, Olin College of Engineering
  • Susie Stephens, Eli Lilly

Panel

Moderator: Jim Hendler, RPI

Panelists
Ivan Herman, W3C
Peter Mika, Yahoo

Submission

Important Dates

Paper submission: February 15th, 2009
Notification: March 8th, 2009
Camera ready papers: March 13th, 2009
Workshop: April 21th, 2009
maintained by Lalana Kagal
 $Revision: 26364 $
$Date: 2009-06-17 00:07:02 -0400 (Wed, 17 Jun 2009) $