OASIS Symposium

The common vision of the Semantic Web is the achievement of seamless and transparent interoperability of services across diverse providers by making the meaningful content of those services openly accessible. For content to become ‘meaningful’ it must be related to more general information schemes for which some semantics has already been provided. Such information schemes range from tag collections, which impose an indirect semantics by means of induced similarity across tagged entities to formal ontologies, which represent explicitly class-subclass relationships, the attributes of such classes as well as additional information that may be known about combinations of such classes and their instances. Whereas the semantic information that is explicitly maintained in ontologies might appear ideal for realizing the Semantic Web vision, substantial problems still render this goal difficult in practice. The symposium will address some of these problem areas.

• Symposium date: October 24, 2011 – 14:00-18:00.

• Submission of papers: Only invited speakers are planned with few exceptions. Authors willing to contribute to the Symposium are requested to send their papers with a length of up to 8 pages no later than September 16, 2011 to the Chair of the Symposium Organizing Committee (bateman@uni-bremen.de). Acceptance notification will be given on September 23, 2011.

The aim of the OASIS Symposium is to serve as a forum to exchange ideas with regard to the realization of a semantic interoperability of services.

OASIS is a Large Scale Integrating Project – partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT 215754) - with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of older people and their enhanced Quality of Life.

Two problem areas are addressed by OASIS:

(i) the inherent complexity of constructing the high quality formal specifications necessary for trustworthy reasoning and (ii) the tendency for many formal specifications to emerge with little overlap in their coverage, modeling styles and intended semantics.

The solutions being explored involve: the replacement of large-scale ontologies by small-scale, application-specific ontologies maintained by those who know their data best, the system developers; automatic and semi-automatic support tools for allowing system developers to flexibly relate their data with re-usable ontologies in their domains of application; and the automatic generation of code supporting seamless data transfer across and within applications. The resulting framework relies on the well supported inter-linking of heterogeneous ‘ontological modules’, which we term a hyper-ontology.

The symposium will present results achieved to date and – through the contribution of highly qualified speakers, external to the OASIS Consortium, will raise issues in the formal foundations and guidelines for future hyper-ontology work and discuss opportunities for new standardization initiatives in the area of hyperontology-driven interoperability.

Specific attention will be devoted to interoperability spanning complex services in the areas of Independent Living, Autonomous and Smart Homes and Workplaces and to the provision of cross-domain networked ontologies, a goal which is itself a substantial research challenge.

Relevant topics that will be raised during the OASIS Symposium include:

• Modular Ontology Design

• Reasoning over content from multiple sources

• Query processing over multiple linked datasets

• Creating applications drawing on multiple data sources

• Open Ontology Repositories

• Information and design quality of ontologies

• Semantic Web Services and support tools

Proceedings will be published online in the OASIS web site (www.oasis-project.eu).

The Symposium will be co-located with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Bonn, Germany ( October 23 - 27, 2011) and will be held on October 24, 2011 (14:00-18:00).

The program of the Symposium includes:

• an opening session,

• papers presented by renewed experts both internal and external to the OASIS Consortium,

• a Round Table discussion titled “Interoperability, Applications and Hyper-ontologies: the way forward”,

• a closing session with a wrap-up.

• demo session

Read more about the program

• John A. Bateman (bateman@uni-bremen.de)

• Angelos Bekiaris (abek@certh.gr)

• Silvio Bonfiglio (silvio.bonfiglio@barco.com)

• Dionisis Kehagias (diok@iti.gr)

• Dagmar Roeller (DRoeller@polisnetwork.eu)

For further information about the Symposium, please contact the OASIS Project Coordinator at silvio.bonfiglio@barco.com.