News Story

Success at Semantic Web conferences

John Domingue, Tuesday 23 Sep 2003

Two out of two – and make it double. This could be an appropriate headline for a recent success of KMi researchers, who secured two accepted papers out of two submissions to two prestigious conferences: International Semantic Web and Knowledge Capture. Both events will take place this October, in Florida, US. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003) is an influential gathering of experts and practitioners behind most of the existing and emerging Web standards (such as XML, RDF, OWL, or DAML/OIL). According to the Programme Chair, Prof. Katia Sycara of Carnegie Mellon University, this year saw the most competitive ISWC with only 49 papers being accepted out of 205 submitted (less than a fifth). This compares with the competitivness of larger and longer established events such as ECAI. the first paper co-authored by Enrico Motta, John Domingue, Liliana Cabral, and Mauro Gaspari (University of Bologna) is titled IRS-II: A Framework and Infrastructure for Semantic Web Services. As the title suggests, the paper tackles the emerging area of semantic web services. Web services are small applications dispersed throughout the Web that can be composed into more sophisticated applications. IRS-II addresses the issue of automating the location, invocation, and composition of web services. It is closely related to emerging web standards such as DAML-S (web services annotation language) or SOAP (web services protocol). The second successful paper is based on the research of Martin Dzbor, John Domingue, and Enrico Motta. It is focused on another emerging area – Semantic Web, and titled Magpie: Towards a Semantic Web browser. Magpie is a small plug-in extending standard web browsers with the ability to layer ontological knowledge over plain-HTML web pages. Magpie combines named entitiy recognition and ontological reasoning, and packages them into a lightweight toolbar that can be used to enrich users’ browsing experiences. The merging of web and knowledge technologies facilitates sense making on the Web. Co-located with the ISWC 2003 is Knowledge Capture Conference (K-Cap 2003). KMi is represented by the work driven by its two final-year research students – Yuangui Lei and Dnyanesh Rajpathak. Yuangui’s submission Design of Customized Web Applications with OntoWeaver and Dnyanesh’s Generic Library of Problem Solving Methods for Scheduling Applications received very good reviews. Yuangui’s paper describes her system OntoWeaver which enables websites to be created and maintained via ontological definitions. Dnyanesh’s PhD focuses on how scheduling components can be indexed semantically for reuse. As with the vast majority of KMi research all of the papers above are based on practical work and consequently have associated tools. Links below point to the web sites of the individual tools which in the case of Magpie and the IRS-II contain downloadable versions.