Semantic Web Working Symposium
30-31 July 2001
Tutorial Track
http://snrc.stanford.edu/~petrie/agents/SWWS-tutorial.html

Demonstrations

7 demonstrations in 2 hours.
Good news - lots of commercial development

Ontology Engineering

Natalya Noy
Stanford Medical Informatics
Excellent overview of basic issues.
Did emphasize need for application-specific ontologies.
Did not emphasize formal semantics.

Semantic B2B Integration

Christoph Bussler
Oracle Corporation
Extemely comprehensive overview of evolving standards and issues.
Was mention of 200 standards a joke?
  (Chris says not.)
Distinguished between semantic and technical integration.
Also did not emphasize technical semantics.

Models and Languages
for Describing and
Discovering E-Services

Fabio Casati
Ming-Chien Shan
Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto
Good overview and discussion of a few important emerging standards.
Focussed on interoperable process standards.
Ontologies wrt formal semantics not an issue.
Can standards initiatives overcome tendency of commercial intrests to have proprietary formats?
Answer - follow stock price of non-compliers.

Last words:

"Pragmatic Unification".
Do applications - promote useful applications.
Work with E-Commerce folk to use academic expertise.
Otherwise - go the way of academic software agents.
Try standards, but modify based on experience and success.
Let integration depend upon required interoperation.