April 24, 2007McGuinness NIST Interoperability Week Ontology Summit Semantic Web Perspective Deborah L. McGuinness Acting Director & Senior Research Scientist Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Stanford University

April 24, 2007McGuinness NIST Interoperability Week Semantic Web The Semantic Web as viewed through academic and industrial forums as represented by, for example, the W3C Semantic Web Activity as well as Markoffs NYTimes article may be used to support the goals and directions of this summit and may also benefit from the summits products.ActivityNYTimes article The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. [Web 3.0s] goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion.

April 24, 2007McGuinness NIST Interoperability Week Semantic Web Layers Semantic Web Languages and tools may be used from all layers of the Semantic Web stack: - language editors & validators (e.g., Protégé, Swoop, …) - ontology evolution environments (e.g., Chimaera, Medius, Prompt, …) - reasoners (e.g., Pellet, Racer, …) - explanation, proof, and trust languages and environments (e.g., PML, Inference Web, …) - domain specific markup languages (e.g., GeoSciML, Chemical Markup Language, …) - search and browsing tools (e.g., SWOOGLE, Tabulator, …) - question answering systems

April 24, 2007McGuinness NIST Interoperability Week Selected Summit products of interest for the Semantic Web community Dimension Fragments provide a foundation for discussion, categorization, representation, and analysis. Population spreadsheet that provides initial markup for ontologies including these dimensions may encourage others to do markup as well. Both the markup utilizing these dimensions and the provenance concerning the markup may provide valuable content Existing semantic web tools such as SWOOGLE – semantic web search engine that finds rdf/owl descriptions of terms - could be enhanced by looking for terms that are in ontologies with a particular kind of intended use Ontologies as design artifacts is a potentially useful and powerful message

April 24, 2007McGuinness NIST Interoperability Week Conclusion We are much stronger together than separately.. So we might say: Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Similarities, Leverage Points, and Distinctions Our communities have focused on some level at interoperability, reuse, machine operational meaning capture smart search question answering Semantic Web is an evolving field that also welcomes input for language and tool requirements and use cases as well as testimonials Current semantic web success stories will potentially benefit from a broader community contributing to ontology/taxonomy/folksonomy generation, and tool and application development Some successes may be seen in 7 years of the international semantic web conference, spin outs including eswc, aswc, … and application areas include health and life science, earth and space science, oil and gas, … Timing is perfect as many Xinformatics departments, conferences, and journals are taking off