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Semast09 Presentations now available
The provisional programme for the workshop is now available.
Details
The second Practical Semantic Astronomy Workshop will be hosted by the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. The workshop will follow a similar pattern to last year's successful event at CalTech, by bringing together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these technologies to address current problems in astroinformatics. Each session will consist of one the keynotes
- Danny Ayers, Talis, UK
- Peter Fox, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
- Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, France
- Joel Sachs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
- Robert Stevens, University of Manchester, UK
together with two related presentations, and plenty of opportunity for discussion. In fact, two of last year's keynotes stated:
"We were totally unable to catch up with our email during the day because the sessions were too good!"
In the recently published book Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2009, Glasgow was the only British city to make the top 10 list of cities to visit. This is due to the city's "exciting contemporary image". More information about the city can be found on our Glasgow page and details of how to get here on our Travel page.
What is Semantic Astronomy?
There is a sizable international effort working on the Virtual Observatory; there is a considerably larger worldwide effort to make the Semantic Web a reality and where these two concerns intersect is Semantic Astronomy.
As a field, it includes subjects such as:
- astronomical and solar ontologies
- knowledgebases
- metadata for astronomical databases
- Semantic integration
- semantic queries and data mining
- the application of semantic technologies
The promise for astronomy (and other sciences) includes:
- semantic data access
- exploiting distributed annotation and heterogeneous sources
- intelligent data dissemination and discovery.
Why is it Practical?
What is particularly exciting is that the Semantic Web has become a set of practical engineering challenges, more concerned with deployment and performance details than AI abstractions, and so we can now start to employ that community's more successful ideas in astronomy.
Aims & Objectives
This workshop aims to:
- inform how semantic technologies are being used successfully in other sciences
- reveal what semantic activities are emerging in astronomy
- foster greater communication between groups working in this exciting area