Workshop: Practical Semantic Astronomy

We are pleased to announce a workshop to be held at Caltech,  
Pasadena, USA from Monday 18 - Thursday 21 February 2008 on Practical  
Semantic Astronomy (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast).

What you may ask is "Semantic Astronomy", let alone "Practical  
Semantic Astronomy"?

There is a sizable international effort working on the Virtual  
Observatory; there is also a considerably larger worldwide effort to  
make the Semantic Web a reality and where these two concerns  
intersect is Semantic Astronomy. As a field, it includes subjects  
such as metadata for astronomical databases, semantic queries and  
data mining, astronomical and solar ontologies, knowledgebases, and  
the application of semantic technologies. The promise for astronomy  
(and other sciences) includes semantic data access, exploiting  
distributed annotation and heterogeneous sources, and intelligent  
data dissemination and discovery. What is particularly exciting is  
that the Semantic Web has become a set of practical engineering  
challenges, more concerned with deployment and performance details  
than AI abstractions, and so we can now start to employ that  
community's more successful ideas in astronomy.

A large subset of the astronomical data in the Virtual Observatory is  
open, and part of the challenge is to semantically link these  
datasets with each other, and with the expanding web of semantic open  
data.

The workshop aims to bring together astronomers and Semantic Web  
researchers who are working or interested in the intersection between  
the two disciplines.

The first day (Mon 18 Feb) will feature a number of review talks from  
experts in other fields that have embraced a semantic approach to  
science.  We have invited: Katy Boerner (Indiana, USA), Peter Fox  
(HAI/NCAR, USA), Tony Hey (Microsoft), Deborah McGuinness (Stanford,  
USA), and Mark Wilkinson (UBC, Canada).

The rest of workshop will focus on hearing what activities  
astronomers are pursuing in this exciting field with lots of  
opportunities for discussions, including the workshop dinner and a  
semantic social networking exercise on the final morning.

The workshop is limited to 35 attendees and the registration deadline  
is 31 October 2007. If you want more information or want to register,  
please go to the website at: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast

     Regards,

     The Scientific Organizing Committee [Elizabeth Auden (MSSL, UK),  
Sebastien Derriere (CDS, France), Matthew Graham (Caltech, USA),  
Norman Gray (Leicester/Glasgow, UK), Brian Thomas (Maryland, USA)]



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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK

Received on Saturday, 22 September 2007 17:18:54 UTC