Semantic Web Working
Symposium
30-31 July 2001
Tutorial Track
http://snrc.stanford.edu/~petrie/agents/tutorial.html
Demonstrations
We had
7 demonstrations in 2 hours!
The good news is that there seems to be lots of commercial development
though some of the demonstrations seemed shallow.
Ontology Engineering
Natalya Noy
Stanford Medical Informatics
This was an excellent overview of basic issues.
It emphasized the need for application-specific ontologies.
Somewhat surprisingly, it not emphasize formal semantics,
which is what distinquishes ontologies from glosseries.
Semantic B2B Integration
Christoph Bussler
Oracle Corporation
This was an extemely
comprehensive overview of evolving standards and issues.
Chris
mentioned that there were over 200 emerging standards and this was no
joke.
He distinguished between semantic and technical integration
and also did not emphasize formal semantics.
Models and Languages
for Describing and
Discovering E-Services
Fabio Casati
Ming-Chien Shan
Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto
This was a good overview and discussion of a few important
emerging standards.
The tutorial focussed on interoperable process standards.
Ontologies wrt formal semantics not an issue.
The issue was raised by the audience: can standards initiatives overcome tendency of
commercial intrests to have proprietary formats?
The answer was: follow stock price of non-compliers.
Last words:
"Pragmatic Unification".
This is my personal view, as expressed during the conference.
We
should do applications and promote applications.
In fact, I
believe that ontologies require applications to be meaningful, and
that ontological integration is meaningful only with the interacton of
applications.
I advise working with commecial E-Commerce folk to
use academic expertise.
Otherwise, formal otology work will go the way of academic software agent
technologies.
We should try standards, but modify them based
on experience and success.
Let ontological integration depend upon
required interoperation of applications.
Stanford Networking Research Center
<petrie@stanford.edu>
Last modified: Tue Oct 23 14:13:47 PDT 2001