Semantics, Openness and New Collaborative Processes
The First Online Metadata and Semantics Research Conference scheduled for November 23-30, has been extended until December 7th.
The website hosts presentations, papers, a forum and a chatline for conference participants to talk at leisure about the conference topics, without moving from their desks. Isn't that what we have been waiting for?
In the future, virtual conferences will be the norm, we'll be able to hook up with our peers by using our webcams and microphones.
"More than one hundred people (virtually) attended the conference, with an overall hit statistic of more than 3500, and more than two hundred posts after the first week. This experiment in on-line conferencing is an attempt to complement the recent "hybrid" experience of ONTOSE'05 ( See Example), providing a way to interact that does not require the scheduling of sessions, while providing a genuine form of networking, socialization and interchange of knowledge and experiences. This is the reason why the main interaction is asynchronous, even though the virtual environment provides also chat facilities. The patterns of interaction in these conferences are being
recorded and studied in order to elaborate some guidelines for future experiences " say the organisers.
The conference opened with keynotes by Amith Sheth, professor at the University of Georgia and chief scientist at
Semagix, and Tom Gruber, ontology veteran and luminary. In his keynote Professor Sheth addresses the challenges of web based ontologies in three distinct areas, information systems, health care and bioinformation, presenting novel and challenging tools that aim to automate semantic annotation of metadata and illustrates, the model of an 'ontology driven information systems lifecycle' from annotation to extraction to multiple application.
Tom Gruber's keynote is a rebuttal to a popular anti-ontology "apple and oranges" blog rant, with a constructive call to action. Professor Gruber aims to shed some cool light and to reconcile two ends of the same rope : "Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social web.
They are created as people associate terms with content that they generate or consume. Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum" says his abstract
Among the many interesting papers , Miltiadis Lytras presents his "Open Research Manifesto", describing concisely a paradigm of open research as a neutral inquiry process that aims at studying which approaches to research are better in objective terms. "Open research is a new concept that challenges current methods, policy and communication in any area of scientific and systematic inquiry. Openness entails not only changes in scholarly publishing as advocated by the open access movement, but also new paradigms of cooperation and dissemination of results and research artifacts. This paper provides an initial, concise view of such open research concept, to serve as a foundation for discussion, specially inside the Open Research Society.
In "Evaluating Wiki Contributions Using Social Networks, a case study on wikipedia" Nikolaos Korfiatis and Ambjörn Naeve carry out an intensive analysis on possible methods to measure and evaluate the new forms of collaboration and interaction facilitating the manipulation of shared artefacts and information spaces such as wiki " we present an approach to the problem of evaluating contribution in shared access repositories such us wikis based on the activity of the contributors as denoted by social network measures. An approach to the concept of Wiki is given using models and techniques of Social Network Analysis targeting the patterns of social ties between contributing
authorities. A case study in the English Language is provided as a proof of concept using the metrics of degree
centrality and group degree centralization."
Álvaro Cabrerizo, Juan A. Prieto present a paper about putting together the advantages provided by the Semantic Web (SW) paradigm and the SOA paradigm, with a proprietary module within a semantic content and
service management system to visually assist users during the creation of interactive dynamic web applications viewed as the composition of parameterized elements of information that are selected from the whole set of semantically described components that the final application may include.
Lots of other interesting papers and discussions look to the future on the website.
www.metadata-semantics.org
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