Re: Semantic Storage and Retrieval Day ?

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 15:20:49 +0200 (CEST)
Dirk-Willem van Gulik <staff@asemantics.com> wrote:
 
> It was good to meet you during the Budapest meeting. Once of the things
> Dave Beckett and various others touched upon was the desire to have a
> "Semantics Storage (and Retrial) Day" or workshop. Which would centre
> around 'real' solution and very practical and down to earth things like
> (simple) query languages and API's. Very bottom of the stack.

My goal was to organise this and help run it as part of the outreach
that the SWAD Europe project which I work for deals with.  Since I
am involved with the guts of semweb data storage, and (co-)written
the reports you mention later, that was the outline of my idea.  Deal
with key implementors in europe (but others are very welcome) on
practical issues and solutions, problems with storing and manipulating
semweb data.

> We'd be quite happy to see if we can make such a thing happen in the
> Netherlands;  lets say within a 30 minute radius around Schiphol Airport
> (which essentially is Amsterdam) and within easy reach from the other three
> (budged) airports which people are likely to use.

Thanks for the offer

> We can do this either by hosting it ourselves or by working with people at
> a Leiden, Delft or Amsterdam university. We have the contacts there to
> borrow a room, and so on - little problem there. If we pick the date right
> - then reasonable accommodation within walking distance from room and
> train station should be little problem.

I was hoping that it might be possible to get ensure some of the nearby
people at the Amsterdam universities such as Frank van Harmelin,
Guus Schrieber, co-chair of the web ontology group interested.

> I'd also would like to collect some sort of papers/position statements or
> something else which we can after the meeting publish as an ID or
> something like that. Just to have a report which kind of follows up as a
> straight implementers report on he 2001 reports by Dave and Libby. [1,2]

I wasn't proposing peer-reviewed workshop papers but position papers
are probably in-order.

> We'll certainly will make sure it is on the 'Night Net', the 24h rail-ring
> between Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht, so that
> before/during/after the meetings all the delights of Amsterdam are within
> striking distance.
> 
> Question:
> 
> ->	Is this something people want ?

I've had a few private mails with interest from several groups.

> -> 	Should it have a strong hands/on RDQL, *QL, RDF Query
> 	related focus ? Or should it also go in depth with regards
> 	to storage strategies, API's and methods ? What scope ?

See below

> ->	One, two or three days ?

I think over two days, maybe 10pm day1 to 4pm day2

> ->	Middle of Q3 - or earlier ? Later ? Specific dates which should
> 	be totally out ? We need about 5-6 weeks to get a meeting room
> 	of the appropriate size and figure out the logistics.

Aiming for Oct or later, taking care not to clash with ISWC in Florida
20-24 Oct.  There also might be clashes in September.

> ->	Any specific group in the Netherlands people feel we should
> 	approach (first) or really work together with; either at a
> 	university or at a company.

Possibly (but more focussed on ontologies, higher level applications??)
  Frank van Harmelen, On-To-Knowledge
  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/

  Guus Schreiber, co-chair of webont, IBROW, Ontoweb
  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/ 

Now both of them are at vu.nl

> ->	How many people roughly < 10, 10-25, 20-50 or >50 ?

aim for 20

> At @semantics we are happy to just be a facilitator, and all to way up to
> essentially host it completely. However - given that we are a small
> company - we obviously have a bit of an agenda. So it may be much better
> if this is done under the banner of an appropriate faculty department.
> And we just facilitate to make this happen. So that is also some of the
> feedback I'd like to hear. As we'd hate to not make use of people or
> knowledge right next door.

> Ref's:
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/rdf_scalable_storage_report/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/rdf_ql_comparison_report/

Our SWAD Europe project, via myself, would be happy to organise the
admin parts of registration, papers, web site, etc. but would need local
help with logistics such as accommodation, rooms, web access, food etc.

I enclose below an updated version of what II proposed originally to the
public-esw@w3.org list which is the public list that SWAD Europe works
on.  Feel free to join that last, in fact I'd like to move the workshop
discussion there if possible, or at least CC: it.

public-esw http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw/

Dave

==============================
Proposal

Title: SWAD Europe Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and APIs

Date: TBD - suggest October - December 2003
  (avoiding ISWC 20-24 Oct)

   Propose a two day event 10am day 1 to 4pm day 2.

Scale: 20 participants

Location: TBD - Amsterdam or nearby suggested

Current Identified Stakeholders (NOT an exclusive list):

  In Europe:
    AKTORS 3store - University of Southampton, UK
    Jena - HP Labs, Bristol, UK
    KAON - FZI / AIFB, Karlsruhe, Germany
    RDFSuite Group - @semantics, Greece, Netherlands, Italy
    Sesame - Aidministrator, Netherlands
    Redland - Dave Beckett (myself), Bristol, UK

    and ... other groups related to the above ?
      On-To-Knowledge - Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
        project includes University of Karlsruhe - KAON, Aidministrator above
      IBROW / OntoWeb / WebOnt co-chair - Guus Schreiber
      Ontoweb projects
      FOAF implementors
      W3C/ERCIM ... 

  Elsewhere, the Europe in the title not withstanding.
    4Suite - Buffalo, USA
    Mindswap - Maryland, USA
    Mozilla - ?, USA
    TAP project - Stanford, USA
    HP USA - DSpace, SIMILE etc - USA
    n3, cwm, ... - MIT/W3C, USA
    rdflib - Daniel Krech, USA


Workshop outline

Existing APIs for the RDF family of technologies (RDF, DAML+OIL, OWL ...)
are maturing after several years of development and improvement.

There is no single dominant API either across multiple languages (ok,
Redland has some of that) or in a single implementation language.
Each of them covers a different goal and has different strengths.

This workshop would aim to bring together existing and new developers
of semantic web storage and APIs to share their experiences and
lessons.  In particular this workshop could cover

  * Implementation techniques
  * Storage models and database schemas
  * Scalability, aggregation and provenance
  * Lessons from using RDBMSes for semantic web storage
  * Test data and queries for performance comparisons across designs.
  * Implementing RDF Datatypes

Possibly covering (might be a bit too off-storage):
  * APIs for query languages
  * OWL and logic layer functionality - inference engines, validation

Expected Outcomes

  * State of the current APIs
  * Indication of state of potential API standardisation
  * Implementation techniques
  * Updated SWAD-E deliverables 10.1, 10.2
  * Proposals for a performance comparision test suite
  * Some Implementation reports on RDF and OWL

Relevant SWAD-E Work

This relates to at least the following SWAD-E work and completed
deliverables (as well as later work).

WP7 Workpackage 7: Databases, Query, API, Interfaces
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/plan/workpackages/live/esw-wp-7.html

  D7.1 RDF API requirements and comparison
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/rdf_api_comparison_report/

  D7.2 Databases, Query, API, Interfaces: report on Query languages
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/rdf_ql_comparison_report/

WP10: Tools for Semantic Web Scalability and Storage
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/plan/workpackages/live/esw-wp-10.html

  D10.1 Scalability and Storage: Survey of Free Software / Open
    Source RDF storage systems 
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/rdf_scalable_storage_report/

  D10.2 Mapping data from RDBMS
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/scalable_rdbms_mapping_report/


Other Events

At ISWC 2003 there is a workshop on
  Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems
  http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/psss03
 
  (site down right now)

so need to take care with not duplicating work.
(Also the event is not in Europe, so tricky for EU pariticpants)

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2003 06:33:38 UTC