Tutorials

Grobelnik, Mozetic (JSI), Witbrock (Cycorp), Hitzler, Haase (AIFB):
"Context Sensitivity in Knowledge Rich Systems" (full day)
Sunday, November 5, 8 AM - 5 PM
Context sensitivity of applications is an important requirement
for modern information and communication systems. The key improvement
is adaptivity to the situations in which the system needs to
react. This enables more efficient and robust functioning in
dynamic environments. Therefore, identification and assignment
of a context is a necessary factor to provide services and
applications that are tailored to the user and the user’s
current situation.
The main goal of this tutorial is to provide an extensive
survey of the past and current work in the area of context related
topics. This includes analysis of the past work: (1) defining
the notion of “context”,
(2) present logic-based formalisms for dealing with contexts,
(3) present probabilistic/fuzzy approaches to model context,
(4) demonstrate “modelling the context” and “reasoning
with contexts” in real-life applications. In addition,
the presented work we will provide a synthesis of the past work
in the light of a unified categorization of context-related approaches
along several dimensions which appear as relevant from theoretical
and practical point of view (see outline for details).
More Information Here

Grosof (MIT), Dean (BBN): "Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, and
their E-Services Applications"
Sunday, November 5, 8 AM - 5 PM
Rules are a main emerging area of the Semantic Web. There has
been significant progress in just the last three years in several
aspects of Semantic Web rules. This includes exciting developments
in the underlying knowledge representation formalisms as well
as advances in integration of rules with ontologies; translations
between heterogeneous commercial rule engines; development
of open-source tools for inferencing and interoperability;
standards proposals and efforts (including RuleML, SWRL, Semantic
Web Service Framework, and recently W3C Rule Interchange Format);
proposals for rule-based semantic Web services; and pilot applications
in the emerging area of e-services. This tutorial will provide
an introduction to these developments and will explore techniques,
applications, and challenges. We will also touch upon the issues
of business value, adoption, investment, and strategy considerations.

Grau, Horrocks, Parsia, Sattler (Manchester), Patel-Schneider (Bell Labs): "Learning from the Masters: Understanding Ontologies found on the Web" (full day)
Sunday, November 5, 8 AM - 5 PM
OWL ontologies are now in use in areas as diverse as e-Science,
medicine,
biology, geography, astronomy, defence, and the automotive
and aerospace industries (to name but a few). OWL is also the
focus of much research into reasoning, language extensions, modeling
techniques, and perhaps most importantly, tool support that
makes these various extensions and techniques accessible to
users. A wide range of tools is already available that make
it significantly easier to work with ontologies. However, many
people are not away of these new features, or just lack the
experience to be able to use them successfully to navigate
through a novel ontology with an eye to understanding it well
enough to pick up useful tips and tricks, or even to understand
it well enough, as a domain expert, to correct or otherwise
modify it.
The purpose of this tutorial is to help attendees
gain sufficient experience of working with OWL and tools to
allow them to fruitfully explore new ontologies that they may
encounter. In other words, they should be able to do the equivalent
of “view source” on
an ontology. Also, they will get better fluency in the use and
abuse of OWL by examining features, limitations, and workarounds
in real contexts, as well as gaining an understanding of the
impact of future extensions of OWL, in particular of rules and
the proposed revision of the language called OWL 1.1.

Katia Sycara and David Martin: "Tools and Technologies for Semantic Web Services: An OWL-S Perspective"
Monday, November 6, 1 PM - 5 PM
This tutorial
will take an in-depth look at the current state of the art
in Web Services and sort through the increasing and confusing
array of relevant tools, languages and theories both from
academia and industry. The tutorial will also present and
discuss business models for Web services and their potential
for business value added. Many examples to illustrate the described
concepts, techniques, tools and their use will be presented.
The tutorial will also discuss limitations of current technologies
and present value added advanced concepts, such as distributed
service composition, Semantic Web enabled Web services, agent-mediated
Web services, as well as open issues that must be addressed with
emphasis on agent researcher contributions.
The tutorial will
have six parts. Part I will present a general brief overview
of the concept of Web Services. Part II will present a critical
survey of the most promising current industry standards. Part
III will present limitations of current state of the art industry
standards and present needed semantic infrastructure for value
added. Part IV will present schemas/languages and ontologies
for semantic description of Web services and semantic annotation
of content of services so they can be agent-discoverable, invocable
and composable. In particular, this part will focus on OWL-S.
Part V will present OWL-S tools and applications. Part VI will
present conclusions, challenges and open problems.