Thinking Clearly .

Oy! The first call for papers for OWL: Experiences and Directions 2007 (note: the official site is down for the holidays…check out the back up the official site is back up) is out. So soon! Yes, well, OWLED won’t be co-located with ISWC 2007 but instead with ESWC 2007. This is, in fact, a bit of Euro/US-centrism. Sorry. It’s pretty much the same reason that DL2007 isn’t going to Australia. The location is far from the very large majority (overwhelming majority, actually) of past and likely future attendees. Obviously, it’s unfair for people living convenient distances from these sites, but it’s unclear that we would get comperable attendance that we’ve enjoyed in prior years. Whine, piss, moan.

(In general, while these quaint out of the way locations are cute and interesting, I’ve become ever more interested in having these events in standard, big, hub locations. Paris, Tokyo, New York, (Philly!), Seoul, London, Dubai, where ever). Travel is rough, and I’m totally selfish about it!

One other advantage of colocating with ESWC is that we’ll continue to colocate with the RuleML conference, or rather with the first International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR2007) which merges RuleML and several other workshops together. DL07 will be around then too.

In any case, submit and attend! OWLED is not an academic workshop (at least, it’s not intended to be). It’s not quite a user conference either, per se. It is a workshop where work gets done. The work is, we hope, advancing the de facto and de jure state of the art with respect to OWL. The first result of OWLED is the OWL 1.1 proposal and, we hope, a follow on W3C working group. There are many areas which could use some cross-community coordination and discussion, e.g., rules, query, constraints, input syntax, DIG 2.0, metamodeling, macros, etc. Tools folks show up; users show up; theorists show up; a good time is had by all.

There is a lot of discussion and there may be more this year. I hope we see more submissions this year that are framed as proposals (or requests, or problem descriptions, etc. etc. etc.). Surveys are especially welcome, so if you’ve always been curious about the different metamodeling proposals out there, dig into that literature and tell us about them! Use cases and detailed, motivated requirements are wonderful too. Success stories are grand as well. System descriptions are jolly.

Of course, please discuss these things on public-owl-dev all the time! OWLED is, I hope and intend, something closer to a “face to face” for the OWL community.

Oh yeah, I’m general chair this this time. Sigh. No rest for the meddlesome!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 6:48 pm and is filed under OWLED2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.