ODBase 2006 - Part 2
Hi again from Montpellier, France. Let me start by saying the Montpellier is very very beautiful city, and if you ever have a chance to come through, you definitely should. Wonderful architecture, great food, perfect weather…its been really nice.
As I said in an earlier post, I’m here attending ODBase 2006. Over the past two days, I’ve been attending talks and chatting with delegates. The conference has been going well, and there have been some interesting talks. I want to point out a few here, as they are relevant to some of the work going on in the Mindswap lab (mainly done by Taowei David Wang). First I want to point out a paper titled ‘Ontology Engineering: A Reality Check’ (Simperl et al.)…the work included a survey of ontology engineers in both academia and industry aimed at capturing current ontology engineering practices, etc. I’m not going to go into the details, but the paper provided some interesting findings; Tawoei, if you read this post, you should definately check this paper out, as it has some relevance to your survey work.
The next talk I briefly wanted to mention was ‘Formalism-Independent Specification of Ontology Mappings - A Metamodelling Approach’ (Brockmans et al.). In particular I wanted to point out the bits in the paper regarding the vizualization of rules and ontologies using an extension to UML. Taowei, looks like its your lucky day…you should check this one out as well 
. Anyway, among other things, in the paper the authors have provided an extension to UML, using UML profiles, allowing users to specify OWL ontologies and rules (SWRL rules if I remember correctly). Additionally, mappings can be specified between ontologies using the intereface. The approach was interesting and worth taking a look at…
Anyway, one more day to go here, then I’m off to Athens, GA for ISWC 2006! Did I mention I lived in Athens, GA for 6 years…it’ll be nice to go home
-Christian Halaschek-Wiener
