SEMANTiCS 2016 (#semanticsconf) continues a long tradition of bringing together colleagues from around the world to present best practices, panels, papers and posters to discuss semantic systems in birds-of-a-feather sessions and informal settings.

What I really liked about this event is the fact that it is primarily industry-focused, meaning that most (if not all) of the talks were dealing with pragmatic aspects of real-world applications of semantic technologies. You can take a look at the online proceedings for more details, alternatively there are some nice videos and pictures pages too.

I meant to share some notes a few weeks ago already but never got round to doing it… so here are a few highlights:

If data infrastructure is as important to our infrastructure as roads, then the Open Data Institute is helping to lay the concrete. Join us on 1 November to hear inspiring stories from around the world on how people are innovating with the web of data, with presentations from diverse innovators – from startups to high-profile speakers such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web), Sir Nigel Shadbolt (AI expert) and Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com founder).

Our presentation was part of a a session titled How to design for open government and enterprise, which included two speakers from industry (me and Tharindi Hapuarachchi from Thomson Reuters Labs) and two from the public sector (Clare Moriarty from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Jamie Whyte from Trafford Council).

Feedback was very positive, in particular the audience seem to have liked the long standing commitment Springer Nature towards making science more open.

Other bits and pieces:

Finally, some more pictures..

Thursday Club Xmas party [ event-site | facebook | flier | map ]

6:30pm sharp til 8:30pm, 2010/12/16 at Goldsmith Digital Studios

Live coding is a new direction in electronic music and video, and is starting to get somewhere interesting. Live coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals. All code manipulation is projected for your pleasure. Live coding is inclusive and accessible to all. Many live coding environments can be downloaded and used for free, with documentation and examples to get you started and friendly on-line communities to help when you get problems. Popular live coding software includes supercollider, ChucK, impromptu and fluxus. Live patching is live coding with graph-based languages such as the venerable pure-data. It’s also possible to livecode with a gamepad, e.g. with the robot oriented Al-Jazari. For more info see: http://toplap.org/

Enjoy live coded music from some of the UKs finest algorithmic musicians, namely:

slub – Slub celebrate a decade since they first got a whole room of people to dance to their code (at Amsterdam Paradiso), with a hard-edged set of abstract acid with extra breakdowns. [ http://slub.org/ ]
Wrongheaded – Conducting an algorithmic seance, where a ouiji board control interface issues instructions from beyond the grave. Dimly lit but for the flickering of gas-driven projector screens, the protagonists will be appropriately moustachioed as they bring you ethereal sounds from the underworld.
Thor Magnusson – Shaking, self-modified beats with ixilang, from the co-founder of ixi audio. [ http://www.ixi-audio.net/ ]
Michele Pasin – Audio/Visual temporal recursion with Impromptu. [ http://www.michelepasin.org/ ]
Forth + Yee-King – South Bank Common Lisp + SuperCollider synchronised in percussive improv. [ http://www.yeeking.net/ ]

Can’t say I haven’t missed the old line up, with “Jumping Jon” Egan, who used to dance around the stage in a trance-like manner while playing a variety of flutes… but still I had quite a bit of fun listening to this weird psychedelic family belting out spacey vibes. Even more cause they included several old Ozrics classics which I really enjoyed!

Here’s an excerpt I’ve taken with my phone:

What is a knowledge representation? Although knowledge representation is one of the central and in some ways most familiar concepts in AI, the most fundamental question about it–What is it?–has rarely been answered directly. Numerous papers have lobbied for one or another variety of representation, other papers have argued for various properties a representation should have, while still others have focused on properties that are important to the notion of representation in general. [continue reading]

Other than that, the scope of the workshop will remain deliberately unspecified so that we are allowed to decide session after session what topics should be discussed. I’ll be posting the slides and research produced in the context of the workshop on this blog, so maybe also others will be interested in taking part in this (either physically or electronically!). if you do, please get in touch :-)

Here’re the slides from our first meeting:

>>>

Among the TOPICS that emerged as needing more reflection:

Finally, some BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Doug. Ontologies: State of the Art, Business Potential, and Grand Challenges. Ontology Management: Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services, and Business Applications (2007) pp. 1-20

Sowa. Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical and Computational Foundations. Course Technology (1999)

Niles and Pease. Towards a Standard Upper Ontology. FOIS’01 (2001)

Doerr. The CIDOC conceptual reference module: an ontological approach to semantic interoperability of metadata. AI Magazine archive (2003) vol. 24 (3) pp. 75-92

Gangemi et al. Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE. 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW02) (2002)

Smith. Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation. Proceedings of FOIS 2004. International Conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems (2004)

Guha and Lenat. Cyc: A Midterm Report. AI Magazine (1990) pp. 1-28

Gruber. It Is What It Does: The Pragmatics of Ontology. Invited presentation to the meeting of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model committee (2003)

Guarino and Welty. Evaluating ontological decisions with OntoClean. Commun. ACM (2002) vol. 45 (2) pp. 61-65

That’s it for now, cheers!

pdf version here

“What happens when you get a bunch of software developers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them?

We’re going to find out.

In London between 4th-6th April 2008, the Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.

Our aim is to find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.”

It’s on tomorrow in all the major italian squares, and various world ones. If I were there, I would definitely join them! (wanna become a friend of Grillo? take a look at this)