Protégé OWL Workshop on Semantic Web and Description Logics

We have received an overwhelming number of registrations for this workshop and therefore decided to slightly change our plans. The large number of people offers a good opportunity to get a representative overview of the community.

This will be a chance for you to:

• hear what other people are doing/planning to do with OWL
• contact people with similar interests or application domains
• ask questions on OWL-related technology and the tools
• meet the developers and make suggestions on the future evolution

... and an opportunity for the developers to:

• get a better understanding of user requirements
• listen to problems and pitfalls
• all that to improve the Protege/OWL tools

The workshop will take place in the afternoon, with a beginner's Protege-OWL tutorial in the morning, so that every attendee should have an overview of the state of the tools.

In order to make this event most interesting and helpful for us all we plan to schedule this workshop as an informal meeting with a real workshop character. There will not be longish presentations (also because we did not get enough submissions), but instead we would like to leave plenty of space for discussion and let the schedule evolve during the two 90 minutes sessions. Here are some suggestions on a rough outline - please contact me if you have additional suggestions:

Session 1: Requirements

We would be glad if every workshop attendee could be prepared to give a short statement of interest in 1-2 minutes. We will roughly have 50 people at the workshop and it would be a great start if we made a round to introduce each other's projects and why and how we need OWL/Semantic Web for this. This should give us a reasonable overview of what our user's requirements will be, and may reveal links between projects (in the sense of a "live Semantic Web between people"). It would be awesome if attendees could send me such a brief summary (who, what, why, how?) prior to the workshop, but it's not required to attend the meeting.

Session 2: Getting Started with OWL and Semantic Web

What are the major obstacles in getting started with OWL/SW projects: Are all user interfaces components easy and efficient? How can we improve the documentation and tutorials? Which concepts of OWL are difficult to understand? Which misconceptions do people have about OWL? How easy/difficult is it for people coming from traditional Protege or object-oriented languages?

Session 3: Future work

How should the tools evolve: What are the plans in Stanford and Manchester? How can we better integrate Semantic Web services and other tools? How do we get OWL ontologies into real-world Semantic Web applications? Have people identified common design patterns that they would like to see supported? Have people come up with versioning strategies, and do they use namespaces and imports? How can we better support the reasoning aspects of OWL such as description logics? Who will work on what in the future?

The organizers (Olivier Dameron, Matthew Horridge, and me) will be able to give short on-the fly demos of features and solutions if that's required. If others have demos/ontologies to share they are more than welcome to do so (please let me know in advance whether you want to get a 5-minute slot with access to the projector).

We hope this will become an interesting and creative meeting and we are looking forward to seeing you all in Washington!

Note that this workshop will take two 90 minutes slots whereas other workshops will only take one 90 minute slot. As a result, we welcome people who only want to join the first or the second half of our workshop.