OWLED 2007 deadline approaching
by Bijan Parsia
The deadline for submissions for OWLED 2007 is March 4th! You, of course, don’t need a submission to attend, but if you are an OWL stakeholder, I strongly encourage you to submit at least a position paper.
OWLED is a great vector for shaping the future of OWL, both in standard bodies and in the field. Aside from OWL 1.1, I, personally, am interested in the community coming to some consensus about rules and query. In the next year, we could have some de facto standards for both of these feeding into the respective ongoing working groups.
And that would be a win!
But there are many other issues, and many I know for a fact I’ve never thought about. So submit! Share your experiences and your perspectives.
I’ll point to two of my favorite papers from last year:
- A View of OWL from the Field: Use cases and Experiences Good quote:
Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) [2] is a terminology that is used at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, for the querying of patient records for various disease states/conditions. MED uses frame-based logic and contains 100,210 concepts and 261 slots. We started by transforming the laboratory concepts present in MED into OWL. Specifically, we modeled just the concepts related to laboratory tests in MED as follows: a laboratory test can be fully specified by the biochemical substance it measures and the sample that is being assessed in the test. We converted corresponding MED slots – 1) entity-measured and 2) assesses-sample into definitional properties (i.e. necessary and sufficient) for 10,981 lab concepts. Next, we used DL subsumption reasoning to classify MED. In comparing the classified hierarchy for such defined concepts with the original taxonomy in MED, we found 44 additional subsumptions for laboratory concepts. On manual analysis of newly inferred subsumptions, 26 were correct subsumptions i.e. the concepts actually had a subclass relationship, as confirmed by a domain expert. Interestingly, the false positives revealed systematic modeling errors.
- Developing ontologies in OWL: An observational study Studying how people work is so important (and actually often very difficult). They took a good stab at studying Protege and TopBraid Composer.
