The Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006) is currently underway in Athens, Georgia, USA (near Atlanta) which is famous for, errrm, being the birthplace of (Hey Ya!) The Outkast. Anyway, three bioinformatics related papers and workshops caught my eye this year and might be of interest to the wider community.
- Khalid Belhajjame reports on experiments to semantically annotate bioinformatics web services [1] and workflows, with some interesting results.
- How many documents are there on the semantic web? The Swoogle Semantic Web Search Engine team use a corpus of more than 1.7 million documents with over 300 million RDF triples to analyse the current size (and success?) of the semantic web [2].
- The next versions of the Web Ontology Language WOL (OWL version 1.1 and eventually 2.0) are being discussed in the OWL workshop [3] where, amongst other life science applications, Alan Ruttenberg, Jonathan Rees and Jeremy Zucker give A Semantic Critique of BioPAX
If you're a semantic webhead, but not at the conference, and want all the gory / geeky detail, Dave! Beckett! from Yahoo! Research! Laboratories! syndicates semantic blogs at Planet RDF where “it's triples all the way down”. Many of these posts have been discussing the conference. Finally, the ISWC 2006 Conference Proceedings are also on-line and SPARQL-able for the ultra-nerdy.
My baby don't mess around because she loves me so and this I know for sure. Uh!
References
- Khalid Belhajjame et al Automatic Annotation of Web Services based on Workflow Definitions
- Li Ding and Tim Finin Characterising the Semantic Web on the Web
- Ian Horrocks, Bijan Parsia and Peter Patel-Schneider OWL: Experiences and Directions 2006 which is a “forum for practitioners in industry and academia, tool developers, and others interested in OWL to describe real and potential applications, to share experience, and to discuss requirements for language extensions/modifications. The workshop will bring users, implementors and researchers together to measure the state of need against the state of the art, and to set an agenda for research and deployment in order to incorporate OWL-based technologies into new applications.” What, you're still reading this? Are you still awake?
- International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006) Group Photo album on Flickr
- Next year: Sixth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), Korea
