Nabble - w3.org - semantic-web

Re: SuRF 1.0.0 Beta released!

2009-11-09T22:48:51Z

Pēteris wrote:
> We are pleased to announce release of SuRF 1.0.0 Beta. This version
> includes some significant changes and improvements in interface, thus
> the major version number shift.
>
> SuRF is an Object - RDF Mapper based on the popular rdflib python
> library. It exposes RDF triple sets as sets of resources and integrates
> them into the Object Oriented paradigm of Python in a similar manner as
> the ActiveRDF does for Ruby.
>

Interesting. I've been using RDFAlchemy for a while, replacing my
home-grown object mapper. I wonder if you're aware of this and whether
anyone might comment on the advantages or otherwise of one or other model.

RDFAlchemy seems to have a little more machinery for pre-defining
classes and the meaning of properties (ie. this is a multiple valued
property). It lacks any kind of query optimisation though - does SuRF
have this - eg. delaying the evaluation of queries until as much as
possible is known...that is, does:

FoafPerson.get_by(foaf_name='John').order(something).limit(10)

get all the Johns and iterate over them or does it construct a bigger
query and let SPARQL do the work? (peeking at the code it looks like it
does which would be neat).

RDFAlchemy: http://www.openvest.com/trac/wiki/RDFAlchemy

Steve

How to represent belief values for two classes in a SWRL rule?

2009-11-09T19:14:00Z

I have written an ontology using OWL, and I defined a property "hasBeliefData" which means that an object has a specified belief value. I have written many SWRL rule, but now I confront difficuties described as follows.
One of SWRL rules is "hasColor(?x, green)->VegetationRegion(?x) ^ hasBeliefData(?x, 0.8)" and another SWRL rule is "hasColor(?x, blue)->SeaRegion(?x) ^ hasBeliefData(?x, 0.9)". Now I want to express the following meaning: "if an object has belief value 0.8 for vegetation region and has belief value 0.9 for sea region, then the object is sea region",
How can I express this meaning in a single SWRL rule? Thank you!

(I hope different kind of belief data can be distinguished in a SWRL rule)

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-09T11:37:31Z

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Holger Knublauch <holger@...> wrote:

>
> On Nov 8, 2009, at 7:03 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
> On 11/4/09, Holger Knublauch <holger@...> wrote:
>
> Since TopBraid Composer [1] was criticized here, please allow me
> explain that it can very well be used in the scenario below. I will
> let the people on this list decide whether it behaves well or not. The
> mechanism it uses has been stable for the last three years, and I
> think it has worked quite well so far.
>
> It does not.
>
> Thanks for sharing *your opinion*.

You are *welcome*.

> The original question was about
> modularizing ontologies so that resources from the same namespace can be
> organized across multiple files. Many users are confused about the
> difference between ontology URIs and namespaces, and I was addressing this.

You have addressed it poorly. There is no connection between the two.
Suggesting otherwise does a disservice.

> You seem to be switching topics now to whether base URIs are a valid
> mechanism to identify those (multiple) files or whether the URIs of
> owl:Ontologies should be used only.

As far as any of the semantic web technologies go xml:base *does not
exist*. The specs know *nothing* about it. Nor should they.

> If users are editing files from their hard drive, TBC will associate
> each file with a base URI. This base URI is later used to resolve
> owl:imports, so that the system can figure out whether it has local
> copies of web resources without going to the web. The base URI is
> retrieved from the files by looking into the first few lines - if it's
> an RDF/XML file then it uses the declared xml:base,

> This is simply wrong and causes problems in practice. Thankfully it is
> finally being fixed in Protege.
>
> Comparing TopBraid and Protege is like comparing apples with oranges.

They were compared because they share the same bug, and because parts
of the protege code base were written by the same developer. Protege 3
and Protege 4 have the same problem in this regard.

> Protege 4 has been designed as a native OWL 2 tool, and it generally cannot
> correctly handle RDF files. TopBraid has been designed as a semantic web
> technology tool with a focus on RDF-based languages including, but not
> limited to, OWL. Many RDF files do not even declare owl:Ontologies, making
> your suggested solution not attractive in general.

I only commented on the OWL case, but since you mention it, the use of
xml base in RDF is similarly unjustified.

> In practice however
> TopBraid makes efforts to make sure that base URI (written as xml:base in
> RDF/XML) and the owl:Ontology remain synchronized.

Tools need to live in the world defined by the specification, so that
artifacts that are generated according to the specification will work
with them. I, and I presume many others, are not interested in
idiosyncratic, tool specific, solutions.

> It will add missing
> owl:Ontology triples if a file gets saved from the web, to maximize OWL
> compatibility. TopBraid also provides a warning if there are more than one
> owl:Ontologies in a file, and has a button to fix this scenario. For most
> back-ends (such as databases), TopBraid also checks for the owl:Ontology to
> learn about the base URI.

These have *nothing* to do with each other.

> So I don't think there are substantial practical
> differences between what you outline and what we have implemented.
> BTW I just downloaded Protege

As far as I know these fixes have not yet been pushed out.

-Alan

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-09T11:14:58Z

On Nov 8, 2009, at 7:03 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

On 11/4/09, Holger Knublauch <holger@...> wrote:
Since TopBraid Composer [1] was criticized here, please allow me
explain that it can very well be used in the scenario below. I will
let the people on this list decide whether it behaves well or not. The
mechanism it uses has been stable for the last three years, and I
think it has worked quite well so far.

It does not.

Thanks for sharing *your opinion*. The original question was about modularizing ontologies so that resources from the same namespace can be organized across multiple files. Many users are confused about the difference between ontology URIs and namespaces, and I was addressing this. You seem to be switching topics now to whether base URIs are a valid mechanism to identify those (multiple) files or whether the URIs of owl:Ontologies should be used only.

If users are editing files from their hard drive, TBC will associate
each file with a base URI. This base URI is later used to resolve
owl:imports, so that the system can figure out whether it has local
copies of web resources without going to the web. The base URI is
retrieved from the files by looking into the first few lines - if it's
an RDF/XML file then it uses the declared xml:base,

This is simply wrong and causes problems in practice. Thankfully it is
finally being fixed in Protege.

Comparing TopBraid and Protege is like comparing apples with oranges. Protege 4 has been designed as a native OWL 2 tool, and it generally cannot correctly handle RDF files. TopBraid has been designed as a semantic web technology tool with a focus on RDF-based languages including, but not limited to, OWL. Many RDF files do not even declare owl:Ontologies, making your suggested solution not attractive in general. In practice however TopBraid makes efforts to make sure that base URI (written as xml:base in RDF/XML) and the owl:Ontology remain synchronized. It will add missing owl:Ontology triples if a file gets saved from the web, to maximize OWL compatibility. TopBraid also provides a warning if there are more than one owl:Ontologies in a file, and has a button to fix this scenario. For most back-ends (such as databases), TopBraid also checks for the owl:Ontology to learn about the base URI. So I don't think there are substantial practical differences between what you outline and what we have implemented.

BTW I just downloaded Protege to see how it handles the case of multiple base URIs (owl:Ontology URIs) across multiple files. With 4.0.1, I did the following:

- Create file test.owl with URI http://example.org/test

- Add a class Person and save

- Create file test2.owl with same base URI as above

- Protege opens the old (!) file test.owl and no file (or warning) gets created !

- Since Protege does not allow me to create two files with the same URI, I

- create a file test2.owl with http://example.org/test2

- Protege opens the file

- Close Protege

- Manually edit test2.owl so that it has the same base URI

- Open test2.owl and add owl:imports to file test.owl

- Imports view now claims to import test.owl, but none of its triples show up

All this shows that the issue is not fixed at all in Protege, and the same kind of base URI/ontology confusion may arise like in TopBraid. IMHO it is still better to allow working with multiple files with the same base URI than just silently ignoring them and hoping for the best.

- I also tried to import http://rdfex.org/foaf/Person,firstName which TopBraid handles without problems, but Protege fails completely because there is no owl:Ontology declared. I guess such a strict interpretation of the OWL spec is not helpful if the OWL community wants to interoperate with RDF-based ontologies. And why should all RDF snippets in the world be forced to declare an extra triple only because some OWL tools are inflexible? OWL is based on RDF, not the other way around.

The xml:base has no status whatsoever
in OWL. owl:imports in both OWL 1 and OWL 2 are based on the ontology
URI. The only way to determine the ontology URI is to fully parse an
OWL file. In doing so one must recognize that certain

:x rdf:type owl:Ontology

triples are the result of serialization of owl:import statements and
so their subject is not the name of the ontology. Once these are
discounted, there should be a single triple of the above form, and
whatever is in the place of the :x is the name of the ontology.

How is this supposed to work in practice? My humble understanding of the owl:imports mechanism is that it is supposed to support importing ontologies, in particular from the web. The URL being imported should therefore align with the physical location of that file, following best linked data practice. If they are different (like in the infamous case of the SWRL ontology) significant problems arise. What is the use case of having distinct base URIs (physical location) and owl:Ontologies? I can certainly see the use case of working with local files (and we do this all the time), but for web-based ontologies this looks like a very bad practice?

In order that a user not pay the price of this computation I suggest
that you cache the ontology name somewhere based on either the file
date, md5, or some other easily computed value that can indicate that
a file has changed.

This could be an optimization for a future version. We have decided against persisting those mappings and instead compute the mapping at start-up because persisting them might introduce yet another thing that gets out of date. But I can see that Protege wants to cache those values because reloading all files to get their owl:Ontology is expensive.

for N3/Turtle
files it uses the URI of the first owl:Ontology, or a base URI comment
in the head, etc. In any case, some base URI is needed to make files
importable.

Also problematic, see above.

I don't think so, see above.

Regards,

Holger

Regards,
Alan

If multiple files have the same base URI then the system
allows users to pick a "primary" file to resolve conflicts. But this
case is rare and can be easily worked around.

It is perfectly valid in TopBraid to split a namespace across multiple
files, and thus edit different snippets. As long as all snippets are
somehow distinguished with unique base URIs (maybe
http://example.org/project/snippet1
, snippet2 etc) then it's possible to open them in isolation or have a
master file that imports them all. A simple union graph export
(possible via SPARQLMotion) can then be used to merge the various
smaller files, or, in the other direction, to split an existing large
file into multiple snippets. TopBraid makes a clear distinction
between the base URI and the unrelated concepts of default namespaces
and other namespaces. This means that all smaller files may contain
instances from multiple namespaces, or the same namespace. Editing
them in TopBraid is no problem, as long as you are aware of how the
system maintains its file-to-base URI mapping. I am more than happy to
discuss this further, but as this might be off-topic I suggest moving
to the TopBraid Composer mailing list [2].

By the way, the idea of using different base URIs (owl:imports
locations) for serving resources from other namespaces has been
implemented in the RDFex service [3], which can be used to import only
selected snippets from larger namespaces.

Thanks,
Holger

[1] http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-composer-users
[3] http://rdfex.org

On Nov 2, 2009, at 8:48 PM, Ian Emmons wrote:

Some tools, such as TopBraid Composer, do not behave well when the
namespace-to-file mapping is not 1-to-1. This fact doesn't say
anything about the right or wrong of your proposal, of course --
only about how easy it will be in practice.

On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Simon Reinhardt wrote:
Hi,

It is becoming somewhat popular for large ontologies to be split
into a core ontology file and module ontology files (which import
the core). Normally each module then gets its own namespace for the
terms defined in it. I was wondering though if that is too
complicated for users of the ontologies. I have seen confusion of
"sioc" and "sioct" (the prefixes for the SIOC core and the SIOC
Types module namespaces) and when such vocabularies get higher
adoption by people not so well versed with ontologies I can see it
happen a lot more often.

So as an alternative I want to explore the idea of just using one
namespace shared between the core and the modules. The advantage
would be not having to guess which namespace to use. One
disadvantage for the developer(s) of the ontology is that a "local
name" can only be used in one of the modules or core, you can't use
the same "word" under a different namespace with a different
meaning. Another disadvantage is that if you want the terms to
dereference to the ontology files they have been defined in then
you can only do that with a "/" namespace (and you have to set up
lots of redirects).

My questions: What do you think of that idea? Can you see any other
advantages or disadvantages? Do you think several namespaces are
not confusing at all? And what are the main advantages to splitting
up ontologies into modules other than being easier to organise? Do
they justify a higher burden on the ontology users?

Thanks,
Simon

ESTC2009: high-level panels and networking

2009-11-09T07:58:25Z

Dear all,

This year’s ESTC conference program offers you a wide spectrum of possibilities to not only attend but also actively participate in the sessions and contribute to the output of Europe’s major conference on Semantic Technologies.

Besides invited talks by experts from Johnson & Johnson, VC company Vulcan Inc. and Verizon Communications and presentations on case studies, business tools and applications and on using technologies, the conference program covers high-quality panels with experts from leading international companies (detailed information available below), interesting workshops and tutorials and unique opportunities to experience networking in relaxed atmosphere aided by innovative tools.
Click here to view the detailed conference program…

CONFERENCE DETAILS

3rd European Semantic Technology Conference 2009
December 2-3, 2009
Hotel Le Meridien | Vienna, Austria
www.estc2009.com

BRING YOUR BUSINNESS PARTNERS AND REGISTER FOR FREE

To register for the ESTC2009, please use the online registration form. If you for some reason cannot attend the whole conference, you have the possibility to purchase day tickets. The social evening event in the Palm House is included in the full ticket as well as in the day ticket of the first conference day. STI International members are entitled to special registration discount. The conference fees range from 180 to 360 EUR. Participants who bring 4 business partners to the conference will receive a free registration voucher. If you have interest in this option, please contact lejla.ibralic-halilovic@....
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ESTC2009 PANELS – DISCUSSIONS ON A HIGH LEVEL

"How to gain venture capital investments - What you always wanted to ask a VC but never dared to do"

Hannes Schwetz from the Austrian Economic Service, John Brimacombe from the British company Spventures, Mark Greaves from the American Vulcan Inc., Aleš Špetič from Zemanta, Suresh Patel from Verdexus and Klaus Matzka representing the Austrian company gamma capital partners will discuss the actual market and finance situation for startups and will give practical insights for all interested parties. William Stevens from Europe Unlimited will moderate this panel.

"Next steps in intelligent information management in the Pharmaceutical and eHealth domains: Facts and trends"

This panel brings together experts from the fields of drug discovery, healthcare, and semantic technologies with the twofold goal of analyzing the impact of such technologies in these sectors and assessing ongoing and new challenges to be addressed in the short and mid-term. Around the discussion table experts from well known companies and organizations will present their perspective on the future developments within these fields: Susie Stephens from Johnson & Johnson, Rudi Studer from the AIFB - University of Karlsruhe, Bo Andersson from Astra Zeneca and Francisco José Farfán from Hospital de Fuenlabrada. Jose Manuel Gomez-Perez from iSOCO will moderate the discussion.

"Linked Data in the Enterprise: is it just another hype or does it have real added value for information management"

Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters, Leigh Dodds from Talis, Richard Cyganiak from DERI Galway and Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise will discuss the significant concept growth of Linked Data in the government and enterprise field over the past year. Paul Miller from The Cloud of Data will moderate this panel.

Detailed descriptions on the panels available here…

MATCHMAKING AND ONSITE TOOLS

Matchmaking @ ESTC2009
Schedule your private business-to-business meetings with the provided matchmaking software. Create your business profile, view the profile of other participants and schedule your meetings.
The matchmaking sessions will take place on both conference days:
December 2 | 18:00 - 19:30
December 3 | 16:30 - 18:00
Please don't forget to activate the matchmaking box in the conference registration form.

Networking terminals
All ESTC2009 participants have the unique opportunity to try out the newest networking tools during the conference:

Automatically exchange vCards with several people via email
Compare up to 4 participants' online presence (based on forename and surname) based upon multiple sources

For more information about the onsite networking tools and the matchmaking sessions please click here...

SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS

A huge thanks to all sponsors and supporters of the ESTC2009!

ESTC2009 is supported by:

AVCO - The Austrian Private Equity and Venture Capital Organisation
BMVIT - Federal Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology
CELTIC - Telecommunication Solutions for European Leadership in Telecommunications
FFG - The Austrian Research Promotion Agency
iSOCO - Intelligent Software Components S.A.
OCG - The Austrian Computer Society
The University of Sheffield

ESTC2009 is sponsored by:

ACTIVE - A consortium of twelve partner organisations from seven different European countries, co-ordinated by British Telecommunications, which aims to increase the productivity of knowledge workers in a pro-active, contextualised, yet easy and unobtrusive way.
AWS - The Austrian National Promotion Bank
Franz Inc. - The US company which developed AllegroGraph.
MATRIXWARE - Provides the users of patent information worldwide with innovative solutions.
iQser AG - Based in Switzerland, designs and develops novel, innovative technologies in the area of intelligent information systems.
NeOn - Aiming to advance the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications.
seekda GmbH - Based upon recent research results from the World Wide Web, seekda is developing high-end industry solutions for e-Tourism.
Service Web 3.0 - A support action from the EU whose mission is to prepare European research and industry for the emerging Internet of Services.
SOA4All - Aims at realizing a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology
STI Innbruck - Is a world leading research institute working on the Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures.
VALUE-IT - Aimes at promoting market driven alignment of EU RTD, fostering innovation and accelerating adoption of Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise.
X-Media - Studies, develops and implements large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media and repositories.

GENERAL CONTACT

STI International
Lejla Ibralic Halilovic
lejla.ibralic-halilovic@...
phone: +43 1 23 64 002
fax: +43 1 23 64 002-99

ESTC2009 - brought to you by STI International

JURIX 2009 -- Call for Participation

2009-11-09T04:57:10Z

(apologies for crossposts)

JURIX 2009
The 22nd International Conference on
Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

Call for Participation

JURIX, the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, has
organized successful conferences on the subject of Legal Knowledge
Based Systems and Information Systems for over 20 years. In these
years, the annual JURIX conference has become an well-known meeting
point for scholars as well as practitioners in this field.

The twenty-second edition of this conference will be from 16-18
December, 2009 and is hosted by Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus
University, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The conference proceedings will be published by IOS Press (Amsterdam,
Berlin, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington DC) in their series ‘Frontiers in
Artificial Intelligence and Applications.’

Conference dates
December 16, 2009:
o Workshop "AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL-09)"
o Tutorial "Natural Language Processing Techniques for Managing Legal
Resources on the Semantic Web"
o Tutorial "Business Process Compliance"
December 17-18, 2009:
o JURIX main conference, including invited lectures by Richard De
Mulder and Marie-Francine Moens
December 17:
o Conference dinner

Conference program and fees
A total of 21 papers will be presented during the conference. A full
program can be found at the JURIX 2009 web site (www.frg.eur.nl/jurix2009
), which also contains detailed information about the conference fees
and how to register.

Visiting Rotterdam
Rotterdam is a modern, international city. The port of Rotterdam is by
far the largest in Europe, but the city has much more to offer, such
as a striking modern architecture, several theaters and a lively
shopping district. Erasmus University’s campus is situated a few
kilometers east of the city centre, with good public transport
connections. Information about getting to Rotterdam and examples of
suitable hotels can be found at the JURIX 2009 website (www.frg.eur.nl/jurix2009
).

Additional information
You can contact the conference organizers by sending an email to:
Kees van Noortwijk (organising chair): jurix2009@....
Guido Governatori (program chair): guido.governatori@....
General information about JURIX: www.jurix.nl.

---
Dr Rinke Hoekstra

AI Department | Leibniz Center for Law
Faculty of Sciences | Faculty of Law
Vrije Universiteit | Universiteit van Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1081a | Kloveniersburgwal 48
1081 HV Amsterdam | 1012 CX Amsterdam
+31-(0)20-5987752 | +31-(0)20-5253499
hoekstra@... | hoekstra@...

Homepage: http://www.few.vu.nl/~hoekstra

CFP: Information Retrieval Facility Conference, 31 May 2010, Vienna

2009-11-09T04:52:52Z

The 1st Information Retrieval Facility Conference provides a
multi-disciplinary, scientific forum for researchers and aims at
bringing young researchers into contact with industry at an early stage.

The 1st IRF Conference tackles 4 complementary research areas:
* Information retrieval
* Semantic web technologies for IR
* Natural language processing for IR
* Large-scale or distributed computing for the above areas

The conference proceedings will be published in Springer LNCS.

General Chair: Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield
Programme Chair: Stefan Rueger, The Open University
Programme Committee: see
http://www.ir-facility.org/events/irf-conference/programme-committee

The conference takes place in Vienna on the 31st of May 2010, one day
before the IRF Symposium 2010.
More information available here:
* IRF Conference: http://www.ir-facility.org/events/irf-conference
* IRF Symposium: http://www.ir-facility.org/events/irf-symposium/2010

IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission: 8 January 2010
Notification of acceptance: 22 February 2010
Final paper submission: 22 March 2010
IRF Conference: 31 May 2010

For queries please e-mail to irfc2010@...

--
Stefan Rueger s.rueger@...
Knowledge Media Institute tel: +44-1908-655 945
The Open University fax: +44-1908-653 169
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK http://kmi.open.ac.uk/mmis

Professor of Knowledge Media, The Open University, UK
Honorary Professor, University of Waikato, NZ

The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC
000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity
registered in Scotland (SC 038302)

Local Organizers sought for ISWC 2011

2009-11-09T04:26:14Z

Local Organizers sought for ISWC 2011

Initial Statements of Interest sought for
Hosting the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011)

Deadline = January 10th, 2010.
****************************************************************************

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA - http://www.iswsa.org/) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 10th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2011.

The Conference Series moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region and we expect that the 2011 edition will be held in Europe.

Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2011 should contact Prof. Enrico Motta (e.motta@...), the SWSA member who is co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2011.

The process comprises two stages.

During the first stage, statements of interest are solicited through an open call. The relevant form is available at http://www.iswsa.org/SWSA-ISWC-StatementOfInterest.pdf.

Once the first phase is complete, SWSA will shortlist a number of applications, who will be invited to submit a full proposal, using the form available at http://www.iswsa.org/SWSA-ISWC-Conf-App-Form.pdf and the budget template available at http://www.iswsa.org/SWSA-ISWC-2010-Budget-Template-v1.0.xls.

More information about the ISWC Conference Series and the bidding process for hosting a conference in the series can be found at http://www.iswsa.org/SWSA-ISWC-Conference-Guide.pdf.

The important dates for applying to host a Conference in 2011 are:

---
January 10th, 2010. Deadline for receiving statements of interest.
January 30th, 2010. Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out.
March 30th, 2010. Formal applications received from shortlisted bids.
April 20th, 2010. SWSA decides on location for 2011 Conference.
---

ISWC 2011 is planned to take place in late October/early November 2011.

--

The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-08T19:20:50Z

Hi,

I think that if the need for modularization is real, it won't be a
problem to have different prefixes, as these should map to distinct
(hopefully) intuitive partitions of an ontology.
I think some simple trick as choosing less confusing prefixed would
help.

ciao,
Andrea

On 26 Oct 2009, at 14:25, Simon Reinhardt wrote:

> Hi,
>
> It is becoming somewhat popular for large ontologies to be split
> into a core ontology file and module ontology files (which import
> the core). Normally each module then gets its own namespace for the
> terms defined in it. I was wondering though if that is too
> complicated for users of the ontologies. I have seen confusion of
> "sioc" and "sioct" (the prefixes for the SIOC core and the SIOC
> Types module namespaces) and when such vocabularies get higher
> adoption by people not so well versed with ontologies I can see it
> happen a lot more often.
>
> So as an alternative I want to explore the idea of just using one
> namespace shared between the core and the modules. The advantage
> would be not having to guess which namespace to use. One
> disadvantage for the developer(s) of the ontology is that a "local
> name" can only be used in one of the modules or core, you can't use
> the same "word" under a different namespace with a different
> meaning. Another disadvantage is that if you want the terms to
> dereference to the ontology files they have been defined in then you
> can only do that with a "/" namespace (and you have to set up lots
> of redirects).
>
> My questions: What do you think of that idea? Can you see any other
> advantages or disadvantages? Do you think several namespaces are not
> confusing at all? And what are the main advantages to splitting up
> ontologies into modules other than being easier to organise? Do they
> justify a higher burden on the ontology users?
>
> Thanks,
> Simon
>

---
Andrea Splendiani
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, UK
andrea.splendiani@...
+44(0)1582 763133 ext 2004

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-08T19:03:29Z

On 11/4/09, Holger Knublauch <holger@...> wrote:
> Since TopBraid Composer [1] was criticized here, please allow me
> explain that it can very well be used in the scenario below. I will
> let the people on this list decide whether it behaves well or not. The
> mechanism it uses has been stable for the last three years, and I
> think it has worked quite well so far.

It does not.

> If users are editing files from their hard drive, TBC will associate
> each file with a base URI. This base URI is later used to resolve
> owl:imports, so that the system can figure out whether it has local
> copies of web resources without going to the web. The base URI is
> retrieved from the files by looking into the first few lines - if it's
> an RDF/XML file then it uses the declared xml:base,

This is simply wrong and causes problems in practice. Thankfully it is
finally being fixed in Protege. The xml:base has no status whatsoever
in OWL. owl:imports in both OWL 1 and OWL 2 are based on the ontology
URI. The only way to determine the ontology URI is to fully parse an
OWL file. In doing so one must recognize that certain

:x rdf:type owl:Ontology

triples are the result of serialization of owl:import statements and
so their subject is not the name of the ontology. Once these are
discounted, there should be a single triple of the above form, and
whatever is in the place of the :x is the name of the ontology.

In order that a user not pay the price of this computation I suggest
that you cache the ontology name somewhere based on either the file
date, md5, or some other easily computed value that can indicate that
a file has changed.

> for N3/Turtle
> files it uses the URI of the first owl:Ontology, or a base URI comment
> in the head, etc. In any case, some base URI is needed to make files
> importable.

Also problematic, see above.

Regards,
Alan

> If multiple files have the same base URI then the system
> allows users to pick a "primary" file to resolve conflicts. But this
> case is rare and can be easily worked around.
>
> It is perfectly valid in TopBraid to split a namespace across multiple
> files, and thus edit different snippets. As long as all snippets are
> somehow distinguished with unique base URIs (maybe
> http://example.org/project/snippet1
> , snippet2 etc) then it's possible to open them in isolation or have a
> master file that imports them all. A simple union graph export
> (possible via SPARQLMotion) can then be used to merge the various
> smaller files, or, in the other direction, to split an existing large
> file into multiple snippets. TopBraid makes a clear distinction
> between the base URI and the unrelated concepts of default namespaces
> and other namespaces. This means that all smaller files may contain
> instances from multiple namespaces, or the same namespace. Editing
> them in TopBraid is no problem, as long as you are aware of how the
> system maintains its file-to-base URI mapping. I am more than happy to
> discuss this further, but as this might be off-topic I suggest moving
> to the TopBraid Composer mailing list [2].
>
> By the way, the idea of using different base URIs (owl:imports
> locations) for serving resources from other namespaces has been
> implemented in the RDFex service [3], which can be used to import only
> selected snippets from larger namespaces.
>
> Thanks,
> Holger
>
> [1] http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html
> [2] http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-composer-users
> [3] http://rdfex.org
>
>
> On Nov 2, 2009, at 8:48 PM, Ian Emmons wrote:
>
>> Some tools, such as TopBraid Composer, do not behave well when the
>> namespace-to-file mapping is not 1-to-1. This fact doesn't say
>> anything about the right or wrong of your proposal, of course --
>> only about how easy it will be in practice.
>>
>>
>> On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Simon Reinhardt wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It is becoming somewhat popular for large ontologies to be split
>>> into a core ontology file and module ontology files (which import
>>> the core). Normally each module then gets its own namespace for the
>>> terms defined in it. I was wondering though if that is too
>>> complicated for users of the ontologies. I have seen confusion of
>>> "sioc" and "sioct" (the prefixes for the SIOC core and the SIOC
>>> Types module namespaces) and when such vocabularies get higher
>>> adoption by people not so well versed with ontologies I can see it
>>> happen a lot more often.
>>>
>>> So as an alternative I want to explore the idea of just using one
>>> namespace shared between the core and the modules. The advantage
>>> would be not having to guess which namespace to use. One
>>> disadvantage for the developer(s) of the ontology is that a "local
>>> name" can only be used in one of the modules or core, you can't use
>>> the same "word" under a different namespace with a different
>>> meaning. Another disadvantage is that if you want the terms to
>>> dereference to the ontology files they have been defined in then
>>> you can only do that with a "/" namespace (and you have to set up
>>> lots of redirects).
>>>
>>> My questions: What do you think of that idea? Can you see any other
>>> advantages or disadvantages? Do you think several namespaces are
>>> not confusing at all? And what are the main advantages to splitting
>>> up ontologies into modules other than being easier to organise? Do
>>> they justify a higher burden on the ontology users?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Simon
>
>
>

MULTICONF-10 Call for papers

2009-11-08T05:41:08Z

MULTICONF-10 Call for papers

The 2010 multi-conference (MULTICONF-10) (website: http://www.promoteresearch.org) will be held during July 12-14, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, USA. The primary goal of MULTICONF is to promote research and developmental activities in computer science, information technology, control engineering, and related fields. Another goal is to promote the dissemination of research to a multidisciplinary audience and to facilitate communication among researchers, developers, practitioners in different fields. The following conferences are planned to be organized as part of MULTICONF-10.

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-10)
International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Control Systems (ARCS-10)
International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics and Chemoinformatics (BCBGC-10)
International Conference on Computer Networks (CN-10)
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-10)
International Conference on High Performance Computing Systems (HPCS-10)
International Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ISP-10)
International Conference on Image and Video Processing and Computer Vision (IVPCV-10)
International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-10)
International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-10)

We invite draft paper submissions. Please see the website http://www.promoteresearch.org for more details.

Sincerely

John Edward

Publicity committee

CFP Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Semantic Web Dynamics

2009-11-06T22:49:01Z

Apologies for the inevitable multiple receptions.

========================================
PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Web Semantics

Special Issue on Semantic Web Dynamics
========================================

Description
-----------
Recent years have witnessed the arrival of more and more semantically
annotated data and related ontologies in the Semantic Web. For example,
the linked data initiative has been very successful in making datasets
available online, with a total of about 5 billion triples all together
so
far. While existing semantic tools and reasoning engines are year after
year getting better in dealing with time invariant domain of ontological
knowledge, supporting rapidly changing information has not yet attracted
sufficient attention.

There are more and more heterogeneous and/or dynamic data types being
created and which integration could lead to interesting applications and
models (e.g. sensor data streams, geospatial information and imagery,
financial transactions, news feeds, 3D models, engineering data,
information for policy intelligence etc.). Current Stream Database
Management Systems provide on the fly analysis of data streams, but they
suffer several limitations: they cannot handle heterogeneous data
streams
originating from a variety of already deployed sensors; they cannot
combine data streams with slowly evolving knowledge at query time; and
they cannot perform reasoning tasks. And in the area of reasoning, while
the problem of classical, time invariant domain of ontological knowledge
has been extensively studied, the task of reasoning with rapidly
changing
information has been mostly neglected and constitutes a new challenge.

Furthermore, ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge and
information, need to be updated too: changes could be initiated
because of
a change in the world being modeled; or by a change in the users needs
which would require a different conceptualization; or by the acquisition
of knowledge previously unknown, unclassified or otherwise
unavailable; or
by the noticing of a design flaw in the original conceptualization. In
all
these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be
modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of
the domain.

This general issue of Semantic Web Dynamics includes difficulties from
both practical and theoretical points of view, raising a variety of
research questions and development challenges, such as how to support
the
ontology and data publishers in maintaining up-to-date, adequate
representations; how to detect the need for evolution and changes; how
to
facilitate the integration of new, dynamic sources in existing datasets
and ontologies; how to validate and evaluate the impact of the changes
on
semantic information; how to handle changes triggered from multiple
sources and collaborative updates; and how to keep track of (possibly
concurrent) versions of and ensure the delivery of up-to-date and valid
knowledge.

Topics of Interest
------------------
For this special issue, we seek articles describing foundational and
theoretical work as well as technological solutions to these challenges.
More specifically, we expect submission on (but not restricted to) the
following topics:

Foundational and formal aspects of Semantic Web dynamics
Language extensions for Semantic Web dynamics
Reasoning with dynamic data and ontologies
Engineering dynamic data and ontologies
Requirements and practical issues for Semantic Web dynamics
Applications of dynamic data and ontologies
Theory for stream reasoning
Logic language for stream reasoning
Scalability issues in stream reasoning
Ontologies for dynamic environments
Dynamic knowledge building, and (re-)use
Ontology evolution and versioning
Language extensions for evolution
Belief revision for ontologies
Change propagation in ontologies dynamic datasets and ontologies
Inconsistency in evolving semantic information
Incremental reasoning
Case studies and applications of ontology and knowledge evolution
Tools to support dynamic data and ontologies

Important Dates
---------------
31 May 2010: Submission deadline
31 August 2010: First-round reviews complete
31 October 2010: Revised papers submitted
23 December 2010: Final acceptance decisions

Method of Submission
--------------------
Only electronic submissions will be considered. The precise method will
be announced later. Any question can be addressed to the guest editors.

Guest Editors
-------------
Grigoris Antoniou (FORTH, Greece)
Mathieu dAquin (The Open University, United Kingdom)
Jeff Z. Pan (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)

ECCM2010 Mini-Symposium on Image Processing and Visualization

2009-11-06T07:54:02Z

Subject: Symposium “Computational Methods in Image Analysis” within the USNCCM IX Congress – Announce & Call for Papers

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Apologies for cross-posting)

Mini-Symposium on Image Processing and Visualization

IV European Congress on Computational Mechanics (ECCM IV):

Solids, Structures and Coupled Problems in Engineering

Palais des Congrès in Paris, France, May 16-21, 2010

http://www.eccm2010.org

We would appreciate if you could distribute this information by your colleagues and co-workers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Colleague,

Within the IV European Congress on Computational Mechanics (ECCM IV): Solids, Structures and Coupled Problems in Engineering (http://www.eccm2010.org), to be held at Palais des Congrès in Paris, France, on 16-21 May 2010, we are organizing the Mini-Symposium on “Image Processing and Visualization” (#12).

Due to your research activities in the related fields, we would like to invite you to submit an invited abstract to our mini-symposium. Your contribution is mostly welcomed, and we would be honoured if you could accept this invitation.

TOPICS OF INTEREST (not restricted to):

- Image Analysis;

- Image Restoration, Compression, Segmentation and Description;

- Object Tracking, Matching, Recognition, and Reconstruction;

- Visual Inspection;

- 3D Vision;

- Medical Imaging;

- Scientific Visualization;

- Enhanced Visualization;

- Human Computer Interaction;

- Virtual Reality;

- Simulation and Animation;

- Data Processing, Modeling and Analysis;

- Numerical Methods, Partial Differential Equations, Level-sets, Meshless and Extended or Enriched Finite Element in Image Processing and Visualization;

- Multifields and Multiphysics Problems involving Image Processing and Visualization;

- Software Development for Image Processing and Visualization;

- Grid Computing in Image Processing and Visualization;

- Applications of Image Processing and Visualization.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for submissions of abstracts: November 20, 2009;

Notification of abstract acceptance: January 7, 2010.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION:

Please go to the abstract submission page (https://www.eccm-2010.org/internet/proposition_abstract.php) and select the Mini-Symposium on “Image Processing and Visualization” (#12).

With kind regards,

João Manuel R. S. Tavares, University of Porto, Portugal, tavares@...

Renato Natal Jorge, University of Porto, Portugal, rnatal@...

Laurent Cohen, Universite Paris IX Dauphine, Paris, France, cohen@...

Gerald Schaefer, Aston University, UK, gerald.schaefer@...

(Organizers of the Mini-Symposium on “Image Processing and Visualization” (#12))

AAAI-10: Last Call for Tutorials

2009-11-05T18:40:21Z

**** NEW TUTORIAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: November 13, 2009 ****

AAAI-10 TUTORIAL FORUM
======================

http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2010/aaai10tutorialcall.php

LATEST NEWS:

* The deadline for submission of AAAI-10 Tutorial Forum Proposals
has been extended to November 13, 2009.

* The notification deadline will be December 7, 2009.

The Tutorial Forum of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI-10) will be held July 11-12, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia
USA. The Tutorial Forum is sponsored by the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

The AAAI-10 Program Committee invites proposals for the Tutorial Forum
of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI-10). The Tutorial Forum will be held July 11-12, 2010 in Atlanta.
Anyone interested in presenting a tutorial at AAAI-10 should submit a
proposal to the 2010 Tutorial Forum Cochairs listed below.

What Is the Tutorial Forum?

The Tutorial Forum provides an opportunity for junior and senior
researchers to spend two days each year freely exploring exciting
advances in disciplines outside their normal focus. We believe this type
of forum is essential for the cross fertilization, cohesiveness, and
vitality of the AI field. We all have a lot to learn from each other;
the Tutorial Forum promotes the continuing education of each member of
the AAAI.

Topics

AAAI is interested in proposals for advanced tutorials at the leading
edge of AI. We are particularly interested in tutorials that offer two
types of knowledge. The first type provides in-depth background tools to
help educate researchers and students for the purpose of conducting AI
research; examples of this type of tutorials from AAAI-08 include
"General Game Playing," "Graphical Models for Multiagent
Decision-Making," and "Satisfied by Message Passing: Probabilistic
Techniques for Combinatorial Problems." A second type of tutorial
provides a broad overview for an AI area that potentially crosses
boundaries with an interesting application area; examples of this type
of tutorial from AAAI-08 include "Social Network Mining: A Tutorial on
Inference and Learning with Social Network Data" and "Machine Learning
for Biomedical Applications."

Our goal is to present a diverse program that includes core areas of AI,
new techniques from allied disciplines that can inform research within
AI, and conversely emerging applications of AI techniques to new areas.
Previous years' tutorial programs provide an indication of the scope and
variety of possible topics. The list is not exclusive; indeed, we are
expressly interested in topics that we would not have imagined to
mention. Finally, note that we very much welcome proposals for
educational approaches that go beyond the traditional format of
four-hour tutorials, exploiting the flexibility that the one-fee
program offers.

Submission Requirements

We need two kinds of information in the proposals: information that will
be used for selecting proposals and information that will appear in the
tutorial description brochure. The proposal should provide sufficient
information to evaluate the quality of the technical content being
taught, the quality of the educational material being used, and the
speakers' skill at presenting this material.

Each proposal should include at least the following:

* Goal of the tutorial: Who is the target audience? What will the
audience walk away with? What makes the topic innovative?

* Content: Detailed outline and list of additional materials,
augmented with samples, such as past tutorial slides and survey
articles, whenever possible. Be as complete as possible.

* Tutorial description: A short paragraph summarizing the tutorial
outline, and the intended duration of the symposium (default is
four hours).

* Prerequisite knowledge: What knowledge is assumed of the target
audience.

Please also submit the following information about the team of
presenters: name, mailing address, phone number, email address;
background in the tutorial area, including a list of publications and/or
presentations; any available examples of work in the area (ideally, a
published tutorial-level article or presentation materials on the
subject); evidence of teaching experience (courses taught or
references); and evidence of scholarship in AI or computer science.

Submission Deadline

Proposals must be received by November 13, 2009. Decisions about the
tutorial program will be made by December 7, 2009. Speakers should be
prepared to submit their tutorial descriptions and bios by January 8,
2010, and to post completed course materials on their websites by June
4, 2010. Please e-mail proposal material to Russell Greiner and Thomas
Lukasiewicz at the following addresses.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

AAAI-10 Tutorial Program Cochairs

* Russell Greiner
Department of Computing Science
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E8
780-492-5461
780-492-1071 (fax)
russ.greiner+Tutorial@...

* Thomas Lukasiewicz
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Wolfson Building, Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3QD, UK
0044-1865-522566
0044-1865-273839 (fax)
Thomas.Lukasiewicz@...

For further information about the AAAI-10 tutorial forum, please see
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2010/aaai10tutorialcall.php

For information about AAAI-10 in general, visit
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai10.php

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-05T13:34:35Z

> >inventing a system of referring to
> >huge sets of those in a URI. Not doable.

huge sets of triples like..named graphs? its already being done

>
> I don't see why naming triples is not doable

URIs for everything is a foundation i stick to. as well

im interested in your scheme, i just do <<Suri>,<Puri>,<Ouri>>

where O(bject)uri is either a data: URI or a file:// or http:// URL to a blob (or a (b)node with type/lang/encoding-tag fields around a blob)

the named-graph crowd seems to advocating creating a graph for each triple youd want to reify, i take it. then youd have ot think up a name for that graph, which hopefully doesnt clash with the name of a normal resource in the system, and somehow usefully describes the triple? id love to see the compoendium of examples that would convince me named graphs is the way to go , not that im likely to switch

> collections of triples isn't either, we already have native lists in RDF.

>
> From the perspective of a triplestore it ought to be optimisable (There
> is no need for them to represent it as triples internally), and in
> serializations sugared-syntax would be sufficient to make it usable.
>
> My reply to the original post explains some of the reasons I think we
> cannot do without meta-triples.
>

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist: Turtle Syntax

2009-11-05T12:05:58Z

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@...> wrote:

> 2009/11/2 Axel Polleres <axel.polleres@...>:
>> ok, so this is a wishlist, so I am allowed to just add my "in an ideal
>> world"-personal-my-private-little-hat-on favorites :-)
>>
>> I have the following:
>>
>> - Turlte has been mentioned exhaustively already... I'd also like to have a
>> "Terse RIF syntax": I think a more RDF based
>> syntax for RIF is still missing for RIF being picked up by the RDF
>> community.
>
> +1
> I'm fairly sure I'm not the only person around here that gets a bit
> scared by RIF's presentation - an easy syntax would make it a lot more
> accessible.

I can deal with the presentation, but I'd dearly love to store RIF in
RDF. Has anyone created a mapping that takes RIF and produces RDF? I
know there's no standard, but I'd like to use something that's in
common use, if it's available.

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-05T09:02:38Z

Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>> The key lack right now is any standard way to refer to a 'part' of an
>> RDF graph from the outside.
>
> That, too. That sort of stuff would mandate naming every triple/binary
> predicate, and inventing a system of referring to huge sets of those in
> a URI. Not doable.

I don't see why naming triples is not doable, nor why having huge
collections of triples isn't either, we already have native lists in RDF.

From the perspective of a triplestore it ought to be optimisable (There
is no need for them to represent it as triples internally), and in
serializations sugared-syntax would be sufficient to make it usable.

My reply to the original post explains some of the reasons I think we
cannot do without meta-triples.

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-05T08:50:04Z

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> So, what should W3C standardize next in the area of RDF, if anything?
> OWL 2 added a bunch of stuff to OWL that users wanted and implementors
> were willing to tackle. Are there things like that around RDF?
>
> My own answer is in a recent blog post:
> http://decentralyze.com/2009/10/30/rdf-2-wishlist/
>
> What's yours?

Sorry, I'm a bit late contributing here; I missed the start of the topic
a couple of days ago.

I've been considering proposing changes to RDF as part of my PhD, the
subject of which is Trust on the Semantic Web, so some of my points here
will come from that perspective.

Reification and Literals are the things first on my list, closely
followed by work on Turtle/N3-like syntaxes.
I won't go into the latter as I think others have covered that far
better than I could.

The stance I take is that the robust extensibility of RDF should be the
foremost concern; there should not be anything which is impossible or
horrible to represent in RDF, otherwise we risk RDF becoming obsolete,
and having to review the data-model again in the future, rather than
only the core vocabularies.

* Meta-Triples

To be able to meet the challenges of implementing Semantic Web agents we
will NEED some way of asserting meta-information about individual
Triples. The exiting use-cases are many; provenance, belief, trust and
quoting are but a few. We can expect any half-decent Semantic Web agent
ought to use all of these.

I'm not taken by Reification, it's ugly, ill supported and over-complex.
You're forced to represent your information in both forms if you want to
use it and assert meta-information about it at the same time.

Graph-level meta-information is good, but it won't be enough. For
example context-based trust could presumably lead to different levels of
belief in different triples from the same graph.
To restrict assertions to graph scope, or force the creation of
singleton graphs would render RDF a pain to use, and thus eventually
obsolete.

My proposal is for a URN scheme for statements such that a statement
itself may be the subject or object of a triple.
The URN scheme would be defined such that it is valid only within a
given context, similar to current blank-node IDs, except that I would
consider a KB or a Triplestore query output a single context so that
queries can tie things together easily.

Obviously you wouldn't be able to state meta-triples about things people
have said in a remote document without re-stating the triple.
However, I think this is a fair compromise, a means for quoting triples
would allow you to state whether or not you also believed this triple.

* Extensible Literals

Prior to reading this thread I'd not considered the case of Literals as
the subject of a triple, so my proposals here are a little shaky.

In addition a language and a datatype we need the ability to state other
meta-information about literals.
My example here comes from the EU requirements for a data interchange
format for research bodies (CERIF 2008).
Personally I think the standard is badly engineered, but it remains that
it can represent something which it is incredibly ugly to do in RDF.
In addition to the language of a Literal, they are required to denote
the translation status of the literal; whether it is the original, or a
machine or human translation.
I can't find a way of representing this in RDF that does not make me
feel unclean.

Another example; what is the language of an Integer? Yes there are other
numbering systems, but Language is a misnomer here.

These meta-facts about literals need to be extensible, and I'm confident
that we could do this in a backwards compatible manner.

In terms of proposals I have nothing concrete here, perhaps use two new
URN spaces as above (one for subject, one for object), I'm not sure;
suggestions are more than welcome.

Marcus

CFP AIMSA 2010 - Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications

2009-11-05T07:43:34Z

Apologies for cross-postings. Please forward to interested colleagues and mailing lists.

***************************************************************

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The 14th International Conference on
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: METHODOLOGY, SYSTEMS, APPLICATIONS
AIMSA 2010

- AI and Knowledge Societies: Learning, Sharing, Amplifying -

Varna, Bulgaria, 8-10th September, 2010
http://www.aimsaconference.org

**** Submission deadline: April 15th, 2010 ****
**** Proceedings published by Springer/LNCS ****

***************************************************************

SCOPE
The AIMSA conference series has provided a biennial forum for the presentation of AI research and development since 1984. The conference, which is held in Bulgaria, covers the full range of topics in Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines and provides an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. AIMSA 2010 is supported by ECCAI, European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.

As its name indicates, the conference is dedicated to Artificial Intelligence in its entirety. However, for AIMSA 2010, we would like to put the emphasis on the application and leverage of Artificial Intelligence technologies in the context of knowledge societies where knowledge creation, accessing, acquiring, and sharing empower individuals and communities. A number of AI techniques play a key role in responding to these challenges. Artificial Intelligence is extensively used in the development of systems for effective management and flexible and personalized access to large knowledge bases, in the semantic web technologies that enable sharing and reuse of and reasoning over semantically annotated resources, in the emerging social semantic web applications that aid humans to collaboratively build semantics, in the construction of intelligent environments for supporting (human and agent) learning, etc. In building such intelligent applications, Artificial Intelligence techniques are typically combined with results from other disciplines such as the social sciences, distributed systems, databases, digital libraries, information retrieval, service oriented applications, etc. AIMSA 2010 aims to reflect this plethora of avenues with special attention to works that demonstrate the potential of AI for supporting learning, sharing, and amplifying of knowledge.

TOPICS
The conference welcomes submissions of original, high quality papers in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, including but not limited to:

* AI in education
* Ambient intelligence
* Automated reasoning
* Collaborative knowledge construction
* Computer vision
* Data mining and data analysis
* Data semantics
* Dialogue management and argumentation
* Distributed AI
* Information integration
* Information retrieval
* Intelligent decision support
* Intelligent techniques for personalization and recommendation
* Intelligent user interfaces
* Knowledge engineering
* Knowledge representation and reasoning
* Large scale knowledge management
* Logic and constraint programming
* Machine learning
* Multi-agent systems
* Multimedia systems
* Natural language processing
* Neural networks
* Ontologies (creating, learning, mapping, merging, alignment, evolution)
* Planning
* Robotics
* Semantic interoperability
* Semantic peer-to-peer and grid systems
* Semantic web content creation and annotation
* Semantic web for desktops or personal information management
* Semantic web for e-learning, e-business, e-culture, e-government, healthcare
* Semantic web inference schemes
* Semantic web services (description, invocation, composition)
* Semantic web technologies for collaboration and cooperation
* Social network analysis, including community discovery and structure
* Social networks and processes on the semantic web
* Trust, privacy, and security on the web
* Visualization and modelling and AI

All submissions will be subject to academic peer review by at least two members of the program committee. Selection criteria include accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results, and quality of presentation.

For each accepted paper, at least one author is required to attend the conference to present the paper.

The best paper of the conference, as selected by the AIMSA 2010 programme committee, will receive the Best Paper Award during the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: April 15, 2010
Notification of acceptance: June 05, 2010
Deadline for camera-ready: June 25, 2010
Conference: September 8-10, 2010

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Papers have to be submitted electronically (in PDF format) on the address: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aimsa2010.
Papers should be written in English and should be no more than 10 pages, font Times 11pt. Authors are requested to follow the LNCS Style. The first page should contain the title of the paper, names and addresses of all authors (including e-mail), an abstract (100-150 words) and a list of keywords.

Submissions should describe original research. Papers accepted for presentation at AIMSA 2010 cannot be presented or have been presented at another meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with previously published work.

Over lengthy or late submissions will be rejected without review. Notification of receipt and acceptance of papers will be sent to the first author.

PROCEEDINGS
The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence subline of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

LANGUAGE
The official language of the conference is English.

LOCATION
AIMSA will be held at the Golden Sands Tourist Complex, 18 km from the north-east of Varna and 24 km from Varna airport. More information is available in the brochure at the conference web site.

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE CHAIR
Darina Dicheva (Winston-Salem State University, USA)

LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE CHAIR
Danail Dochev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Gennady Agre (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Grigoris Antoniou (ICS-FORTH, Heraklion, Greece)
Annalisa Appice (University of Bari, Italy)
Sören Auer (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Franz Baader (Technical University Dresden, Germany)
Roman Barták (Charles University, Czech Republic)
Petr Berka (University of Economics, Prague)
Mária Bieliková (Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia)
Guido Boella (University of Torino, Italy)
Paulo Bouquet (University of Trento, Italy)
Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
Valerie Camps (IRIT, Paul Sabatier University, France)
Yves Demazeau (CNRS, LIG Laboratory, France)
Christo Dichev (Winston-Salem State University, USA)
Ying Ding (Indiana University, USA)
Danail Dochev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Peter Dolog (Aalborg University, Denmark)
Ben du Boulay (University of Sussex, UK)
Stefan Edelkamp (TZI, Bremen University, Germany)
Floriana Esposito (University of Bari, Italy)
Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA Rhône-Alpes, France)
Dragan Gasevic (Athabasca University, Canada)
Chiara Ghidini (FBK, Center for Information Technology, Italy)
Enrico Giunchiglia (University of Genova, Italy)
Vania Dimitrova (University of Leeds, UK)
Martin Dzbor (Open University, UK)
Michael Fisher (University of Liverpool, UK)
Harry Halpin (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Dominikus Heckmann (Saarland University, Germany)
Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University, USA)
Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Irena Koprinska (University of Sydney, Australia)
Atanas Kyriakov (Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group Corp., Bulgaria)
H. Chad Lane (USC/Institute for Creative Technologies, USA)
Ruben Lara (Telefonica R&D, Spain)
Dominique Longin (IRIT, Paul Sabatier University, France)
Pierre Marquis (University of Artois, France)
Michela Milano (University of Bologna, Italy)
Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University, Japan)
Radoslav Pavlov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Marco Pistore (FBK, Center for Information Technology, Italy)
Enric Plaza (Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - CSIC, Spain)
Allan Ramsay (University of Manchester, UK)
Zbigniew Ras (University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA)
Ioannis Refanidis (University of Macedonia, Greece)
Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Italy)
Paolo Rosso (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain)
Giovanni Semeraro (University of Bari, Italy)
Luciano Serafini (FBK, Center for Information Technology, Italy)
Pavel Shvaiko (TasLab, Informatica Trentina, Italy)
Giorgos Stamou (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Umberto Straccia (Institute of Information Science and Technologies - CNR, Italy)
York Sure (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
Valentina Tamma (University of Liverpool, UK)
Annette ten Teije (Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Klaus Tochtermann (Know-Center Graz, Austria)
Dan Tufis (Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Romanian Academy, Romania)
Petko Valtchev (University of Montréal, Canada)
Julita Vassileva (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Johanna Voelker (University of Mannheim, Germany)

ORGANISERS
Bulgarian Artificial Intelligence Association
Institute of Information Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IIT - BAS)

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist: Turtle Syntax

2009-11-04T16:27:23Z

2009/11/2 Axel Polleres <axel.polleres@...>:
> ok, so this is a wishlist, so I am allowed to just add my "in an ideal
> world"-personal-my-private-little-hat-on favorites :-)
>
> I have the following:
>
> - Turlte has been mentioned exhaustively already... I'd also like to have a
> "Terse RIF syntax": I think a more RDF based
> syntax for RIF is still missing for RIF being picked up by the RDF
> community.

+1
I'm fairly sure I'm not the only person around here that gets a bit
scared by RIF's presentation - an easy syntax would make it a lot more
accessible.

If that meant rubbber-stamping N3 and
> nailing down its corresponding RIF fragment, that could be a good starting
> point.

I suspect rubber-stamping N3 might be a bit of a rathole, though if
anyone has the confidence to take it on, it would be lovely to see.

>
> - Annotations for RDF: apart from quads/named graphs, you want to give
> arbitrary annotations to RDF triples
> (time, provenance, trust, etc.). Is reification (without any real
> reification semantics) which is the
> only existing way to support annotations, really the right way to solve
> this?
> I think that would be a good time to taking a step back and looking at
> triple-level annotations with
> fresh eyes once more?

POWDER?

>
> - closing the XML-RDF gaps: It seems that the XML and RDF languages specing
> goes determined parallel
> paths in W3C with no real visible perspective for convergence. Integrated
> XML+RDF query languages,
> or maybe an XG for XML2RDF/RDF2XML would be cool: GRDDL is a starting
> point, but the current way to
> translate into RDF/XML and then use XML transformation languages instead
> of directly using SPARQL/SPARQL-Update
> seems like an unnecessary detour.

Think I might disagree there - so much of the XML stack is tied to a
tree model, and that distracts from the intuitive graph perspective on
RDF.

> In general, I think a workshop on "RDF what's next" or specific workshops to
> any of the above-mentioned topics would
> be necessary/welcome. The easy to solve issues (what anybody a lot of people
> are using, things like Turtle, named graphs)
> should probably go right into rec track, for the othe issues XGs might be a
> good instrument.

Absolutely - a lot of the annoyances we have could probably be bashed
out through a bit of informal f2f time, and from there getting the
rubber stamp would be a no-brainer.

> Nice, so now thatI've written that down I can wait for Chrismtmas and see
> what Santa Sandro will bring ;-)

Love it! Bet he's developing a white beard now...

Cheers,
Danny.

--
http://danny.ayers.name

3rd CFP Agent-Directed Simulation, April 12-14, 2010, Orlando, Florida

2009-11-04T09:22:50Z

===============================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS and POSTERS
Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium (ADS'10)
Orlando, Florida, USA
April 12-14, 2010

http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~oren/conf-org/ADS_2010/ADS-CFP.htm
Manuscript Submission: November 30, 2009.

Sponsored by The Society for Modeling and Simulation
International (SCS) in collaboration with ACM/SIGSIM.
==============================================================

As part of the 2010 Spring Simulation Multi-conference (SpringSim'10)
http://www.scs.org/confernc/springsim/springsim10/springsim10.htm

the 2010 Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium is a premier platform to
explore all three aspects of the synergy of simulation and agent
technologies. Hence, it has a special place within simulation and
agent conferences, including agent-based (social) simulation
conferences. Therefore the ADS symposium fills a gap in the agent
community as well as the simulation community.

The purpose of the ADS symposium is to facilitate dissemination of the
most recent advancements in the theory, methodology, application, and
toolkits of agent-directed simulation. Agent-directed simulation is
comprehensive in the integration of agent and simulation technologies,
by including models that use agents to develop domain-specific
simulations, i.e., agent simulation (this is often referred to as
agent-based simulation -when other two important aspects are not
considered), and by also including the use of agent technology to
develop simulation techniques and toolkits that are subsequently
applied, either with or without agents.

Hence, agent-directed simulation consists of three distinct, yet
related areas that can be grouped under two categories as follows:

1. Simulation for Agents (agent simulation): simulation of agent
systems in engineering, human and social dynamics, military
applications etc.
2. Agents for Simulation (which has two aspects): agent-supported
simulation deals with the use of agents as a support facility to
enable computer assistance in problem solving or enhancing
cognitive capabilities; and agent-based simulation that focuses
on the use of agents for the generation of model behavior in a
simulation study.

Through the theme of agent-directed simulation, the symposium will
bring together agent technologies, tools, toolkits, platforms,
languages, methodologies, and applications in a pragmatic manner. In
this symposium, established researchers, educators, and students are
encouraged to come together and discuss the benefits of agent
technology in their use and application for simulation. It is a way
for people to discuss why and how they have used agent technology in
their simulations, and describe the benefit of having done so.

The theme of ADS'10 is based on the observation of the following
premises.

* The growth of new advanced distributed computing standards along
with the rapid rise of e-commerce are providing a new context that
acts as a critical driver for the development of next generation
systems. These standards revolve around service-oriented
technologies, pervasive computing, web-services, Grid, autonomic
computing, ambient intelligence etc. The supporting role that
intelligent agents play in the development of such systems is
becoming pervasive, and simulation plays a critical role in the
analysis and design of such systems.

* The use of emergent agent technologies at the organization,
interaction (e.g., coordination, negotiation, communication) and
agent levels (i.e. reasoning, autonomy) are expected to advance
the state of the art in various application technologies is
difficult. Using agent-supported simulation techniques for
testing complex agent systems is up and coming field.

* To facilitate bridging the gap between research and application,
there is a need for tools, agent programming languages, and
methodologies to analyze, design, and implement complex,
non-trivial agent-based simulations. Existing agent-based
simulation tools are still not mature enough to enable developing
agents with varying degrees cognitive and reasoning capabilities.

ADS'10 will provide a leading forum to bring together researchers and
practitioners from diverse simulation societies within computer science,
social sciences, engineering, business, education, human factors, and
systems engineering. The involvement of various agent-directed
simulation groups will enable the cross-fertilization of ideas and
development of new perspectives by fostering novel advanced solutions,
as well as enabling technologies for agent-directed simulation

AUTHOR GUIDE

* Technical papers provide a longer format for presenting experience
reports, research results, or descriptions of "work in progress".
They are limited to 8 pages.

* Short position papers are targeted at raising a question or framing
an issue for discussion during the symposium. Position papers are
limited to 3 pages.

* Poster presentations present an opportunity to present work in
progress and receive feedback from colleagues. A one page write-up
of the poster presentations will be included in the proceedings.

(For all, required font sizes are: min 10 pt for text and min 9 pt for
figures or references).

Papers should be submitted electronically to
http://www.softconf.com/scs/ADS10/ .
All papers will be subject to a peer-reviewing process by three program
committee members. (Please see the key dates listed below.)

FINAL PAPER SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All prospective authors, whose papers are accepted for inclusion in the
program, will be invited to submit their position or technical papers
to ADS'10. Accepted and registered papers will be published in the
conference proceedings by the SCS. In addition, the committee will
select a set of best papers. Authors of these papers will be encouraged to
submit appropriately expanded versions of these papers for journal
publication.

KEY DATES
Nov 30, 2009: Manuscript submission
Dec 30, 2009: Notification of acceptance
Jan 20, 2010: Full Camera-ready papers
Apr 12-14, 2010: ADS'10 Symposium

General Co-Chair
Levent Yilmaz, Auburn University
Tuncer Ören, University of Ottawa
Program Co-Chair
Gregory Madey, University of Notre Dame
Maarten Sierhuis, Carnegie Mellon University, NASA Ames Research Center
Yu Zhang, Trinity University

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-04T08:34:04Z

I think lot of suggestions here in this thread are going to far, and
mixing basic RDF spec, with specialized RDF vocabularies (for stuff like
logic, vocabulary specification - RDFS, OWL), RDF tools functionality
(syntaxes, storage - versioning) and cookbook-like recommendations.

So I would like RDF2 to clearly draw the line what really would be part
of RDF, so I can jump of the train before my nightmares come true and
RDF becomes a heavy-footed behemoth.

IMHO some things like for example n-ary relation representation
(http://esw.w3.org/topic/RecordDescription vs
http://esw.w3.org/topic/CurriedFunction vs
http://esw.w3.org/topic/ArgumentList), or some logic and ontology stuff
are differences between various specialized communities which were drawn
together by generality of RDF and W3C shouldn't bless one approach, but
rather let them coexist, supporting creation of mappings between them.

Best,
Jiri Prochazka
http://mud.cz/foaf.rdf#me

PS: Noticed only now, 2 days later, that I forgot to CC to the list,
sorry Sandro for double mail.

Sandro Hawke wrote:

> So, what should W3C standardize next in the area of RDF, if anything?
> OWL 2 added a bunch of stuff to OWL that users wanted and implementors
> were willing to tackle. Are there things like that around RDF?
>
> My own answer is in a recent blog post:
> http://decentralyze.com/2009/10/30/rdf-2-wishlist/
>
> What's yours?
>
> Two quick caveats:
>
> * W3C takes backward compatibility very seriously. If you're
> proposing something that doesn't have a solid migration story,
> please call it something else, something that doesn't look like
> it's taking over from RDF. Serious proposals should allow
> existing data-consumer and data-producer systems to keep working,
> with only gentle pressure for upgrading as people want to
> interoperate with the new features.
>
> * While public input (like this) is welcome, and good for laying
> out the options, to actually have a seat at the table in deciding
> what W3C does next, an organization has to join W3C and help pay
> the bills. See http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership for
> details. Argue facts and designs here, but priorities there.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- Sandro (W3C staff contact for RIF, OWL, SPARQL, eGov)
>

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CfP: CIAO! 2010 workshop to be held in conjunction with the DESRIST conference

2009-11-04T06:28:06Z

===================================================================
6th International Workshop on

Cooperation & Interoperability - Architecture & Ontology
(CIAO! 2010)
http://www.ciaonetwork.org/index.php?id=61

04 - 05 June 2010
St. Gallen, Switzerland

To be held in conjunction with the
DESRIST 2010 conference
http://desrist2010.iwi.unisg.ch/

Proceedings published in
Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
(LNBIP)
===================================================================

Motivation
----------
Modern enterprises face a strong economical pressure to increase
competitiveness, to operate on a global market, and to engage in
alliances of several kinds. Agility thus has become the new guiding
principle for enterprises. This requires flexible organizational
structures and business processes, as well as flexible supporting
information systems and a flexible ICT-infrastructure. In addition, an
enterprise needs to be able to easily expand or shrink, be it through
cooperation with other enterprises, through mergers or acquisitions,
or through insourcing or outsourcing of services.

In order to meet these economical requirements, enterprises rely
increasingly on the benefits of modern information and communication
technology (ICT). However, the appropriate knowledge to deploy this
technology as needed, and in an effective and efficient way, is
largely lacking, particularly knowledge regarding the cooperation in
and between enterprises and knowledge regarding the interoperability
of their information systems.

Focus and Goal
--------------
The CIAO! workshop is a leading workshop in the emerging field of
Enterprise Engineering, which is based on the notions of Enterprise
Ontology and Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Ontology is
conceptually defined as (the understanding of) the essence of an
enterprise. Operationally, it is its highest-level constructional
model, completely independent of the way in which it is implemented.
Enterprise Architecture is conceptually defined as the normative
restriction of design freedom. Operationally, it is the set of design
principles that are applicable to the (re)design of the enterprise's
business processes, organization, information systems, etc.

The goal of the workshop is to gather academics and practitioners in
order to share innovative research issues and practical experiences,
and to facilitate profound discussions about these issues, in
particular about the application of the notions of architecture and
ontology in dealing with inter- and intra-organizational business
processes and the interoperability of supporting information systems.

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not limited to:

* Modeling (cross-enterprise) business processes
* Reference models for (cross-enterprise) business processes
* Cooperation theories (e.g., the language-action-perspective)
* Domain reference ontologies
* Enterprise ontologies
* Enterprise architectures
* Business rules
* Information system ontologies
* Information system architectures
* Component-based system development
* Ontology-based web services
* Interoperability testing and verification
* Service Oriented Architecture

Organization of the Workshop
----------------------------
The CIAO! 2010 workshop is the 6th workshop of a series of successful
workshops. (CIAO!'09, CIAO!'08, MIOS-CIAO'06, MIOS-INTEROP'05,
MIOS'04) held at the CAiSE and OTM Federated conferences so far.

We are looking for articles on current or recently finished research
projects as well as articles from practitioners. Based on our
inspiring experience of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009 workshops,
the CIAO! 2010 workshop is planned again to be a real workshop,
providing ample time for discussions and group works, during two days.
Consequently, the paper presentations will be short, covering only the
highlights. In addition, the focus of discussion will be on CIAO: the
problem areas Cooperation and Interoperability, and the application of
Architecture and Ontology in dealing with them.

Submission Conditions
---------------------
Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must
be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions
must conform to Springer's LNBIP format and should not exceed 15
pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices.
Submissions not conforming to the LNBIP format or exceeding 15 pages
will be rejected without review. Information about the Springer LNBIP
format can be found at Springer LNBIP Web page (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-487211-0
).

Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at
the end of the abstract.

Important Dates
---------------
Abstract Submission: January 15, 2010
Paper Submission: January 22, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: February 19, 2010
Camera Ready Paper Due: March 05, 2010
CIAO! 2010 Workshop: June 04-05, 2010
DESRIST 2010 Conference: June 04-05, 2010

Program Chairs
--------------
Antonia Albani (a.albani@...)
Chair of Information Systems Design
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Jan L.G. Dietz (j.l.g.dietz@...)
Chair of Information Systems Design
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Program Committee (to be completed)
-----------------------------------
Wil van der Aalst Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Joseph Barjis Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Johann Eder University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Joaquim Filipe School of Technology of Setúbal, Portugal
Rony G. Flatscher Vienna University of Economics and
Business Administration, Austria
Birgit Hofreiter Hochschule Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein
Jan Hoogervorst Sogeti Netherlands, The Netherlands
Christian Huemer Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Peter Loos University of Saarland, Germany
Aldo de Moor CommunitySense, The Netherlands
Hans Mulder University of Antwerp, Belgium
Martin Op ‘t Land Capgemini, The Netherlands
Erik Proper Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Gil Regev École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),
Itecor, Switzerland
Pnina Soffer MIS department, Haifa University, Israel
Pedro de Sousa Lisbon University of Technology, Portugal
José Tribolet INESC and Lisbon University of Technology,
Portugal

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-03T21:17:01Z

Since TopBraid Composer [1] was criticized here, please allow me
explain that it can very well be used in the scenario below. I will
let the people on this list decide whether it behaves well or not. The
mechanism it uses has been stable for the last three years, and I
think it has worked quite well so far.

If users are editing files from their hard drive, TBC will associate
each file with a base URI. This base URI is later used to resolve
owl:imports, so that the system can figure out whether it has local
copies of web resources without going to the web. The base URI is
retrieved from the files by looking into the first few lines - if it's
an RDF/XML file then it uses the declared xml:base, for N3/Turtle
files it uses the URI of the first owl:Ontology, or a base URI comment
in the head, etc. In any case, some base URI is needed to make files
importable. If multiple files have the same base URI then the system
allows users to pick a "primary" file to resolve conflicts. But this
case is rare and can be easily worked around.

It is perfectly valid in TopBraid to split a namespace across multiple
files, and thus edit different snippets. As long as all snippets are
somehow distinguished with unique base URIs (maybe http://example.org/project/snippet1
, snippet2 etc) then it's possible to open them in isolation or have a
master file that imports them all. A simple union graph export
(possible via SPARQLMotion) can then be used to merge the various
smaller files, or, in the other direction, to split an existing large
file into multiple snippets. TopBraid makes a clear distinction
between the base URI and the unrelated concepts of default namespaces
and other namespaces. This means that all smaller files may contain
instances from multiple namespaces, or the same namespace. Editing
them in TopBraid is no problem, as long as you are aware of how the
system maintains its file-to-base URI mapping. I am more than happy to
discuss this further, but as this might be off-topic I suggest moving
to the TopBraid Composer mailing list [2].

By the way, the idea of using different base URIs (owl:imports
locations) for serving resources from other namespaces has been
implemented in the RDFex service [3], which can be used to import only
selected snippets from larger namespaces.

Thanks,
Holger

[1] http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/topbraid-composer-users
[3] http://rdfex.org

On Nov 2, 2009, at 8:48 PM, Ian Emmons wrote:

> Some tools, such as TopBraid Composer, do not behave well when the
> namespace-to-file mapping is not 1-to-1. This fact doesn't say
> anything about the right or wrong of your proposal, of course --
> only about how easy it will be in practice.
>
>
> On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Simon Reinhardt wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> It is becoming somewhat popular for large ontologies to be split
>> into a core ontology file and module ontology files (which import
>> the core). Normally each module then gets its own namespace for the
>> terms defined in it. I was wondering though if that is too
>> complicated for users of the ontologies. I have seen confusion of
>> "sioc" and "sioct" (the prefixes for the SIOC core and the SIOC
>> Types module namespaces) and when such vocabularies get higher
>> adoption by people not so well versed with ontologies I can see it
>> happen a lot more often.
>>
>> So as an alternative I want to explore the idea of just using one
>> namespace shared between the core and the modules. The advantage
>> would be not having to guess which namespace to use. One
>> disadvantage for the developer(s) of the ontology is that a "local
>> name" can only be used in one of the modules or core, you can't use
>> the same "word" under a different namespace with a different
>> meaning. Another disadvantage is that if you want the terms to
>> dereference to the ontology files they have been defined in then
>> you can only do that with a "/" namespace (and you have to set up
>> lots of redirects).
>>
>> My questions: What do you think of that idea? Can you see any other
>> advantages or disadvantages? Do you think several namespaces are
>> not confusing at all? And what are the main advantages to splitting
>> up ontologies into modules other than being easier to organise? Do
>> they justify a higher burden on the ontology users?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Simon

SuRF 1.0.0 Beta released!

2009-11-03T07:16:57Z

We are pleased to announce release of SuRF 1.0.0 Beta. This version
includes some significant changes and improvements in interface, thus
the major version number shift.

SuRF is an Object - RDF Mapper based on the popular rdflib python
library. It exposes RDF triple sets as sets of resources and integrates
them into the Object Oriented paradigm of Python in a similar manner as
the ActiveRDF does for Ruby.

New features in 1.0.0 Beta version:

* Improved resource querying. Can mix any of these features
together:
* filter resources by attribute values
* filter resources using SPARQL filter expressions
* limit, offset, order ascending/descending
* specify graph/context where resources should be loaded from
and later saved to
* eager-load resource attributes
* Improved attribute querying. All the querying features available
at resource level are also available at attribute level.
* Growing amount of documentation and examples. Still big gaps there
but the situation is improving.

Project Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/surfrdf/
Documentation: http://packages.python.org/SuRF/

You are very welcome to try it out, tell us about your experiences,
report bugs and participate!

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist: Turtle Syntax

2009-11-03T06:46:36Z

Hello,

Axel Polleres schrieb:
> ok, so this is a wishlist, so I am allowed to just add my "in an ideal
> world"-personal-my-private-little-hat-on favorites :-)
>
[...]

>
> - Annotations for RDF: apart from quads/named graphs, you want to give
> arbitrary annotations to RDF triples
> (time, provenance, trust, etc.). Is reification (without any real
> reification semantics) which is the
> only existing way to support annotations, really the right way to
> solve this?
> I think that would be a good time to taking a step back and looking at
> triple-level annotations with
> fresh eyes once more?

+1

Annotations on triple basis have been a major problem in several of our
(and other) projects, e.g. DBpedia. OWL 2 Axiom Annotations (or to a
lesser extent RDF reification) provide the necessary means to do add
meta information, but do not have a very nice RDF encoding (which is a
significant problem in very large knowledge bases). Thinking about
(optional) statement identifiers or similar concepts for RDF 2 would be
very welcome.

Kind regards,

Jens

--
Dipl. Inf. Jens Lehmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Homepage: http://www.jens-lehmann.org
GPG Key: http://jens-lehmann.org/jens_lehmann.asc

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-03T02:17:46Z

AS: "Do nothing."

Very sensible advice. What's been done is more than enough.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Seaborne" <andy.seaborne@...>
To: <semantic-web@...>
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

> An alternative viewpoint:
>
> Do nothing.
>
> Don't be too quick to change things - it's already out there.
>
> There are things that might not have been such as good idea looking
> back, but change, any change has a cost. Let people explain RDF, let
> people use RDF-based systems, without creating a sense of instability
> and potential change.
>
> (oh, go on - Turtle syntax - it least it helps explain RDF)
>
> Andy
>
>
>

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-03T02:01:33Z

An alternative viewpoint:

Do nothing.

Don't be too quick to change things - it's already out there.

There are things that might not have been such as good idea looking
back, but change, any change has a cost. Let people explain RDF, let
people use RDF-based systems, without creating a sense of instability
and potential change.

(oh, go on - Turtle syntax - it least it helps explain RDF)

Andy

Re: rdf:PlainLiteral (was Re: RDF 2 Wishlist)

2009-11-02T23:45:33Z

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg@...> wrote:
>> Since it's an error to use rdf:PlainLiteral in RDF/XML, giving a warning
>> remains a good idea.
>
> It's an error to use it this way: "foo@"^^rdf:PlainLiteral.
>
> But it's not an error to use it this way: :p rdfs:range rdf:PlainLiteral.

Good point. I hope someone's writing all this down! It'd be a shame to
relive it all a second time if a WG does restart...

cheers,

Dan

Re: rdf:PlainLiteral (was Re: RDF 2 Wishlist)

2009-11-02T23:40:19Z

> Since it's an error to use rdf:PlainLiteral in RDF/XML, giving a warning
> remains a good idea.

It's an error to use it this way: "foo@"^^rdf:PlainLiteral.

But it's not an error to use it this way: :p rdfs:range rdf:PlainLiteral.

-Alan

rdf:PlainLiteral (was Re: RDF 2 Wishlist)

2009-11-02T23:28:04Z

> It still remains a bad idea in my opinion because

Both your reasons are based on a misunderstanding. The key bit you're
missing:

applications that employ this datatype MUST use plain literals
(instead of rdf:PlainLiteral typed literals) whenever a syntax
for plain literals is provided, such as in existing syntaxes for
RDF graphs and SPARQL results.

In other words, rdf:PlainLiteral literals MUST NOT appear in RDF/XML,
N-Triples, Turtle, RDFa, etc. On the other hand, they MAY appear in
documents using the OWL XML syntax and RIF XML syntax, which do not
have any other way to state plain literals. No old code needs to
change, and new code (for some new syntaxes) can be simpler (having only
datatyped literals).

> 1) It attempts to update an existing REC without updating the document by
> adding a new term to the rdf: namespace
>
> It has this interaction with the rdf/xml recommendation (2004):
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-syntax-grammar-20040210/#section-Namespace
> "Any other names are not defined and SHOULD generate a warning when
> encountered, but should otherwise behave normally."
>
> That'll be showing up in logs and validators probably.

Since it's an error to use rdf:PlainLiteral in RDF/XML, giving a warning
remains a good idea.

> 2) Adds two ways to do one thing
>
> The RDF(2004) REC (concepts, syntax) way, which includes all derived formats
> and implementations that are based on rdf(2004) concepts - syntaxes, APIs
> and the OWL2(2009) / rdf:text way.

As you can see now, there remains only one way to serialize an RDF Plain
Literal in a given syntax.

This design is tricky, and kind of odd, I know, but I don't think it
causes the problems you were thinking it did.

-- Sandro

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-02T21:19:28Z

Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Dave Beckett <dave@...> wrote:
>> Jie Bao wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@...> wrote:
>>>> So, what should W3C standardize next in the area of RDF, if anything?
>>> replace (with backward compatibility assurance) the use of plain
>>> literals with rdf:PlainLiteral [1] - this datatype is defined in the
>>> RDF namespace anyway.
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-text/
>> rdf:PlainLiteral is a hilarious bad idea
>>
>> Don't use it for anything and definitely don't put it into core RDF.
>>
>> If you want to know more - primarily because it cannot encode all RDF
>> plain/typed literals (it is incomplete just like RDF/XML) and has no rules
>> for escaping the characters used for separators (@, <, >). Hilarious.
>
> Where did you get that idea? That's simply incorrect. The case of @ is
> explicitly shown as an example in the table. "<" and ">" are not
> delimiters for rdf:plainLiteral.
>
> In existing RDF syntaxes the serialization is the same as already
> exists for xsd:string and plain literals.
>
> I'm not advocating that it be introduced into standard RDF syntax,
> btw, but don't like to let this sort of mistake stand.

OK, I had a deeper look at this doc and I apologise - it does seem complete.

However the lexical form definition is poorly described.

It would be improved with examples of how to encode a plain literal with the
string values "", "@" and "@@" since these seem edge cases not covered.

It still remains a bad idea in my opinion because

1) It attempts to update an existing REC without updating the document by
adding a new term to the rdf: namespace

It has this interaction with the rdf/xml recommendation (2004):
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-syntax-grammar-20040210/#section-Namespace
"Any other names are not defined and SHOULD generate a warning when
encountered, but should otherwise behave normally."

That'll be showing up in logs and validators probably.

2) Adds two ways to do one thing

The RDF(2004) REC (concepts, syntax) way, which includes all derived formats
and implementations that are based on rdf(2004) concepts - syntaxes, APIs
and the OWL2(2009) / rdf:text way.

Dave

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist: Turtle Syntax

2009-11-02T21:18:25Z

On 2 Nov 2009, at 13:58, Peter Ansell wrote:

> 2009/11/3 Axel Polleres <axel.polleres@...>:
> > ok, so this is a wishlist, so I am allowed to just add my "in an
> ideal
> > world"-personal-my-private-little-hat-on favorites :-)
> >
> > I have the following:
> >
> <snip>
> > - closing the XML-RDF gaps: It seems that the XML and RDF
> languages specing
> > goes determined parallel
> > paths in W3C with no real visible perspective for convergence.
> Integrated
> > XML+RDF query languages,
> > or maybe an XG for XML2RDF/RDF2XML would be cool: GRDDL is a
> starting
> > point, but the current way to
> > translate into RDF/XML and then use XML transformation languages
> instead
> > of directly using SPARQL/SPARQL-Update
> > seems like an unnecessary detour.
>
> Isn't that what the XSPARQL submission you were involved in is about?
> [1] Is there a better method for transformations that has been
> designed so far?
>

As you say, that is a submission... not more, not less.
Waiting for being taken somewhere. In the meanwhille, indeed we find it
a quite useful starting point and are working on some tweaks.

Axel

> Cheers,
>
> Peter
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2009/01/
>

Re: Ontology modules and namespaces

2009-11-02T20:48:58Z

Some tools, such as TopBraid Composer, do not behave well when the
namespace-to-file mapping is not 1-to-1. This fact doesn't say
anything about the right or wrong of your proposal, of course -- only
about how easy it will be in practice.

On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Simon Reinhardt wrote:

smime.p7s (5K) Download Attachment

Re: RDF 2 Wishlist

2009-11-02T18:01:54Z

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Dave Beckett <dave@...> wrote:

> Jie Bao wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@...> wrote:
>>> So, what should W3C standardize next in the area of RDF, if anything?
>>
>> replace (with backward compatibility assurance) the use of plain
>> literals with rdf:PlainLiteral [1] - this datatype is defined in the
>> RDF namespace anyway.
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-text/
>
> rdf:PlainLiteral is a hilarious bad idea
>
> Don't use it for anything and definitely don't put it into core RDF.
>
> If you want to know more - primarily because it cannot encode all RDF
> plain/typed literals (it is incomplete just like RDF/XML) and has no rules
> for escaping the characters used for separators (@, <, >). Hilarious.

Where did you get that idea? That's simply incorrect. The case of @ is
explicitly shown as an example in the table. "<" and ">" are not
delimiters for rdf:plainLiteral.

In existing RDF syntaxes the serialization is the same as already
exists for xsd:string and plain literals.

I'm not advocating that it be introduced into standard RDF syntax,
btw, but don't like to let this sort of mistake stand.

-Alan

>
> Dave
>
>
>