OWLED 2011
OWL: Experiences and Directions

Eigth International Workshop
San Francisco, California, USA
June 5-6 2011

Co-located with SemTech 2011

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June 5th 2011

9.00 - 9:30 Registration

9.30 - 9:45 Welcome - introduction

9:45 - 10:45 Keynote: OWL: Path to Massive Deployment

If we look at utilization of OWL outside of its own development and research committee, we see some high-profile success stories, among the most widespread being the adoption of the Good Relations ontology for commerce and SKOS for vocabulary management. But examples like this are, so far, too few and far between for OWL to be considered a web-scale success. Seen from an industrial point of view, what things about OWL ‘click’, and what things are barriers to adoption? In this talk, I draw on experience training over a thousand practitioners from a dozen industries in Semantic Web technologies (including OWL as well as the rest of the Semantic Web stack), comparing how people from different industries and backgrounds react to the fundamental aspects of OWL. These comparisons indicate possible directions for OWL presentation, marketing and deployment.

Dr. Allemang is the Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant, Inc, a US company specializing in Semantic Web software and services. He is an internationally recognized expert in the Semantic Web with a strong formal background in Mathematics (MSc, University of Cambridge) and Computer Science (PhD, Ohio State University). For the past seven years, he has lead TopQuadrant's successful TopMIND training series, from which he drew much of the inspiration for his recent book (co-authored with Prof. Jim Hendler), Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist (now available in four languages). Dr. Allemang brings years of experience applying knowledge-based technologies to real business problems.

10.45:11:00 break

11:00 - 12:30 The Rough Guide to the OWL API: a tutorial

The OWL API is a Java API for applications that manage and query OWL 2 ontologies. This tutorial will illustrate its design philosophy, showing how to load, modify and save ontologies, validate them, add and remove annotations and leveraging their semantics, i.e., use one of the many compliant reasoners to complete inference tasks. Snippets of code will be used to illustrate the finer details, and a simple application will be shown in detail to give the participants a feeling for the practicalities of using OWL 2. Some third party extensions will be discussed.

Instructor short bio:
Ignazio Palmisano is a research software developer in the Computer Science Department at Manchester University, Manchester, UK. He is involved in the current development of the OWL API, in the context of the Bio-Health Informatics Group. He is been working with OWL, and more in general Semantic Web, since his student days: he was awarded his PhD in Computer Science from University of Bari, Bari, Italy, defending a thesis on applying machine learning algorithms for OWL ontologies to the problem of alignment between ontologies, and has investigated the use of OWL ontologies in multiagent systems during his postdoc at University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; his most relevant publications are listed on his DBLP page.

12.30 - 1.30 Lunch break

1.30 - 3.00 Tutorial: A little more semantics goes a lot further! Getting more out of Linked Data with OWL

This tutorial will provide detailed instruction for scientists, engineers and programmers to create and make use of formalized ontologies from linked open data in the most scalable manner for more advanced knowledge discovery including consistency checking and answering sophisticated questions.

Instructors short bio:
Dr. Michel Dumontier is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at Carleton University in the Department of Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and School of Computer Science. With over 45 publications relating in bioinformatics with an emphasis on using Semantic Web technologies for biochemical knowledge representation and reasoning, Dr. Dumontier is a recognized expert in applying ontologies to large scale data integration. Dr. Dumontier is the lead on the Translational Medicine task force of the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has participated in the W3C working group for the most recent version of the Web Ontology Language (OWL2). Dr. Dumontier teaches several graduate courses on modeling and simulation and biochemical knowledge representation and reasoning. At the undergraduate level he teaches metabolic biochemistry, bioinformatics and computational systems biology.
Dr. Robert Hoehndorf is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. and has more than 6 years experience in applying ontologies to data integration and interoperability in biology and biomedicine. Dr. Hoehndorf has given several seminars on ontologies in medical information systems to graduate students. His prime interests include applications of formal ontologies in bioinformatics, with a particular focus on large-scale semantic integration of research databases as well as the use of ontologies in the prediction of genetic diseases and phenotypes. Dr. Hoehndorf has more than 30 publications relating to biomedical ontologies and the use of knowledge representation and reasoning for data and knowledge integration.

3:00 - 3.15 break

3.15 - 4.45 Tutorial: OWL and Rules

The relationship between the Web Ontology Language OWL and rule-based formalisms has been the subject of many discussions and research investigations, some of them controversial. From the many attempts to reconcile the two paradigms, we present some of the newest developments. More precisely, we show which kind of rules can be modeled in the current version of OWL, and we show how OWL can be extended to incorporate rules without compromising OWL design principles. More information can be found at the tutorial webpage.

Instructor's short bio:
Pascal Hitzler is assistant professor, since 2009, at the Kno.e.sis Center for Knowledge-enabled Computing, which is an Ohio Center of Excellence at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A. His research record lists over 160 publications in such diverse areas as semantic web, neural-symbolic integration, knowledge representation and reasoning, denotational semantics, and set-theoretic topology. He is Editor-in-chief of the IOS Press journal "Semantic Web - Interoperability, Usability, Applicability" and the IOS Press book series "Studies on the Semantic Web". He is co-author of the W3C Recommendation "OWL 2 Primer" and of the textbook "Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies" by CRC Press, 2009, one of only seven "Outstanding Academic Titles" in Computer Science as listed by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine. For more information, see http://www.pascal-hitzler.de.

5.00: End day 1 - SemTech welcome reception

7.30: Workshop dinner at Fang Restaurant

June 6th 2011