[ontology-summit] [Tools][Reuse][Variety][Bottlenecks] Meeting broad que

[Amanda Vizedom <amanda.vizedom@xxxxxxxxx>]

All,  

To be clear, here I am wearing my audience/participant hat, not any kind of organizer hat.

If we are going raise such broad questions as "Are ontology languages relevant for applications on the Web of (Big) Data?" I hope, very, very strongly, that we do not think about them as hypothetical or approach them as one might in an academic research context.

Rather, I hope that we turn our attention to the fact that there are, *right now*, in the world of web applications, big data, and linked data, *many* people and projects making use of ontologies, or at least information represented in ontology languages and utilizing some features of those languages. Talking about the question of relevance theoretically seems to me less important than talking about findings in the field, especially for the purposes of cross-field exchange for as highlighted in the Summit topic and goals.

Yesterday, we heard from Chris Welty, discussing one such well-known example in the big data space: Watson. Chris gave some very interesting details about what aspects of ontological knowledge are used in Watson and how, and which are not used, and why.

I hope that we have more opportunities like this, not only in this track but in all tracks. I want to hear more about how people who have been creating successful semantic web, big data, and linked data (which I think often combines the other two) have been doing it. How are they using ontologies? What have they found to be useful and not useful? What has worked and hasn't worked?

I'm attaching this comment to the language-relevance thread, but really, everything I've just said also applies to reuse, bottlenecks, and especially variety.  Again, wearing my participant hat only, I'd like to challenge the content track organizers to bring in more people to share *their* answers to these questions based on experience in the field. 

And to my fellow participants, all:  What do you think of this? Do you agree? If so, what semweb, big data, linked data artifacts and projects would you like to hear about? What experienced practitioners would you like to hear from?

Eager to get the most out of this opportunity,

Amanda

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:47 PM, Christoph LANGE <math.semantic.web@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear all,

after the end of a great session on "making use of ontologies – tools,
services, techniques", with inspiring input by TillMossakowski,
ChrisWelty and AlanRector (thanks once more to all speakers!), the
discussion is really just starting…

Polemically one could argue that real-world services like Watson need
Big Data (such as common human knowledge), and they need ontologies in
the sense of some structured way of processing Big Data – but do they
need (formal) ontology _languages_?

In the more formal world we see that OWL 2 offers much more alternatives
for modeling knowledge-rich applications than OWL 1, I'm personally not
aware of plans towards OWL 3, and in the formal world there are also
translations between OWL and representations such as UML, which may
appeal better to humans and has complementary tool support – but to what
extent are these formalisms related to what humans think and know and
how they use language?

In short: facing the reality of Big Data and the need for increasingly
intelligent services, (how) can ontology-based tools and techniques help?

Cheers,

Christoph

--
Christoph Lange, Enterprise Information Systems Department
Applied Computer Science @ University of Bonn; Fraunhofer IAIS
http://langec.wordpress.com/about, Skype duke4701

→ Semantic Publishing Challenge: Assessing the Quality of Scientific Output
  ESWC, 25–29 May 2014, Crete, Greece.  https://tinyurl.com/SPChallenge14
  Abstract submission until 7 March.

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