• SWOp Home
• Workshop description
• Workshop objectives

• Participants
• Presentations & demos
• Live webcast from the event

About this workshop

Workshop on semantic web interoperability has been organized as an invitation-only workshop, with a purpose to gather together all the various groups who have developed or are developing semantic web sites, portals or other semantic infrastructures, in order to discuss the state of the art, key open issues and (especially) to agree concrete actions to foster interoperability between these sites.

The overall goal of the workshop has been to agree realistic steps to improve interoperability between sem web sites. By participating to the workshop each site agrees to commit 1-2 person months to achieve these goals. A metaphor the organizers proposed was one of an alliance of semantic providers analogous to the efforts of world-wide airlines, such as Star Alliance or Skyteam. The results of joining such alliance is essentially one service provider automatically giving access to all sort of services to other airlines.

This workshop was the first in what is hoped to become a series of regular meetings aiming to make a significant push towards "the second generation Web" (as Semantic Web is also known). The "network effect" of joining web-accessible, semantic knowledge repositories from a number of leading institutions active in the area of Semantic Web research, is seen as a key to bootstrapping the Semantic Web, and allowing more complex applications to emerge.

Workshop objectives

Launch a "Semantic Interoperability Alliance"

In terms of technological first steps it was agreed to pursue a federated approach with fully distributed knowledge repositories that would however, be aware of each other's content and functionalities using the emerging standard of SPARQL.

Promote interoperability among so-far separate semantically enriched web sites

Apart from the obvious benefits deriving from touching base and learning from everybody else, this activity may also lead to joint bids (esp. with European partners), and participation to the prestigious Semantic Web Challenge.

Presentations from the workshop

The presentations are added as participants submit them. The current list of talks and demos is available on the "Presentations page".

Participants contributing to the workshop

The workshop held on 7th February 2005 KMi played a host to representatives from a number of leading institutions active in the area of Semantic Web research. The following list shows the participants together with the "flagship" tool or technology they showcased:

• SEAL ... a semantic portal from University of Karlsruhe
  
  
• SWOOP and PhotoStuff ... semantic technologies from University of Maryland MINDSWAP lab
  
  
• FLINK ... a semantic social network analyzer from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  
  
• Aqualog, Magpie and eSpotter ... suite of semantic technologies from Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University
  
  
• WebODE/KnowledgeWeb ... aplication of an architecture for developing semantic portals from University Polytechnics Madrid
  
  
• myTea and CS AKTive Space ... semantic application for the GRID from University of Southampton
  
  
• FOAFRealm and YARS ... suite of semantic stores from Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway