Ontology Summit Semantic Web Perspective

Deborah L. McGuinnessActing Director & Senior Research Scientist

Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryStanford University

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/

Semantic Web• The Semantic Web as viewed through academic and industrial

forums as represented by, for example, the W3C Semantic Web Activity as well as Markoff’s NYTimes article may be used to support the goals and directions of this summit and may also benefit from the summit’s products.

• “The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.’

• “[Web 3.0’s] goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion.”

Semantic Web LayersSemantic Web Languages and tools

may be used from all layers of the Semantic Web stack:- language editors & validators (e.g., Protégé, Swoop, …)

- ontology evolution environments (e.g., Chimaera, Medius, Prompt, …)

- reasoners (e.g., Pellet, Racer, …)

- explanation, proof, and trust languages and environments (e.g., PML, Inference Web, …)

- domain specific markup languages (e.g., GeoSciML, Chemical Markup Language, …)

- search and browsing tools (e.g., SWOOGLE, Tabulator, …)

- question answering systemshttp://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1023-iswc-tbl/slide26-0.html http://flickr.com/photos/pshab/291147522/

Selected Summit products of interest for the Semantic Web community

• Dimension Fragments provide a foundation for discussion, categorization, representation, and analysis.

• Population spreadsheet that provides initial markup for ontologies including these dimensions may encourage others to do markup as well.

• Both the markup utilizing these dimensions and the provenance concerning the markup may provide valuable content

• Existing semantic web tools such as SWOOGLE – semantic web search engine that finds rdf/owl descriptions of terms - could be enhanced by looking for terms that are in ontologies with a particular kind of intended use

• Ontologies as design artifacts is a potentially useful and powerful message

ConclusionWe are much stronger together than separately.. So we might say: Ontology,

Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Similarities, Leverage Points, and Distinctions

Our communities have focused on some level atinteroperability, reuse, machine operational meaning capture“smart” searchquestion answering

Semantic Web is an evolving field that also welcomes input for language and tool requirements and use cases as well as testimonials

Current semantic web success stories will potentially benefit from a broader community contributing to ontology/taxonomy/folksonomy generation, and tool and application development

Some successes may be seen in 7 years of the international semantic web conference, spin outs including eswc, aswc, … and application areas include health and life science, earth and space science, oil and gas, …

Timing is perfect as many Xinformatics departments, conferences, and journals are taking off