Seminar Series on Semantic Technologies

Vestlandsforsking is 25 years and we are celebrating this by offering a series of seminars on semantic technologies. The series starts Thursday 11th of Nov and will continue until June 2011. All seminars will be streamed and the video will also be available for download afterwards. More information about the dates for the seminars in 2011 will follow later. The topics to be presented in 2011 are also subject to changes.
We would like to thank Difi, the Resource network for e-Government (Verdikt) and ABM Utvikling for sponsoring this series. The seminars will be held in English.

Date:

3 Nov 2010

The seminars will take place at Sogndal Hotel from 13.00 to 15.00 (GMT + 2) on the announced dates.

Outline of seminar series

11.11. kl 13.00	Introduction to the seminars by Agnes Landstad, director at Vestlandsforsking
	Formal languages by Terje Aaberge, Vestlandsforsking Application area for semantic technologies First order logic: notation and formal semantics (extensional and intensional), decidability Description Logics: rationale (decidability: expressiveness/computability), notation
01.12. kl 13.00	The Semantic Web by Robert Engels, Vestlandsforsking/ESIS RDF:triples Linked Open Data
15.12. kl 13.00 14.01.11 kl. 13.00	Topic Maps by Lars Marius Garshol, Bouvet Human-oriented semantics? What makes a technology semantic? What semantic technologies are there? Introduction to Topic Maps Global Knowledge Federation The standards Available products Example applications Learn more Conclusion (benefits, downsides) The presentation (SlideShare)
25.03.11 kl. 13.00	SPARQL by David Norheim, Computas Linked (Open) Data SPARQL 1.0 and SPARQL 1.1 SPARQL Endpoints SPARQL examples
25.05.11 - 27.05.11	WIMS'11 Conference Keynotes and panel discussion.

Description

The Semantic Web is currently one of the most motivating and ambitious challenges that the scientific and technological community is facing. While notable progresses have been made in terms of consolidation of basic philosophy and infrastructure, new issues, technologies, and tools are emerging.

These issues include creating, presenting and managing Semantic Web content, making semantics explicit in order to automatically integrate data from different sources, and to search for information based on its meaning rather than its syntactic form.

This monthly seminar series aims at being a cool meeting for brainstorming and debating among researchers and developers of Semantic technologies, with a special focus on aspects which can enable wide-scale use.

The list of topics given below is subject to change depending on feedback but the first 4-5 topics are fairly settled because we want to start the seminar series preferably by mid October.

Audience

The workshop aims at attracting researchers, developers and interested practitioners alike. The setting for the seminar is interactive, and presentations are expected to focus on practical issues and the underlying theoretical aspects and open ideas, reporting both on learned experiences and on ongoing work. The presentation language is English.

All lectures will be streamed on the Net (webcast) and also be available as video on demand afterwards.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this seminar series participants will
•    be familiar with terminology used in the topical area
•    be familiar with semantic technology best practices
•    learn how to move from theory to design and implementation
•    get a list of resources for further studies and exploration