SERES 2010 - 1st International Workshop on Semantic Repositories for the Web (SERES 2010)

Ontologies and Linked Data vocabularies are being actively developed and used by numerous applications. Several domains are making their vocabularies available for others to reuse. In addition, good practices when developing ontologies are often followed, particularly for producing reusable modules. The Semantic Web is a modular and highly federated environment of reusable knowledge sources; these provide the meaning so that SW applications change our experience of the web. Within this context, the need for repositories delivering the added value that makes the SW a concrete step beyond our current experience of the web is palpable. SERES addresses issues around semantic repositories within the context of the SW.

The number of ontologies being built and made available for reuse has increased steadily in the last few years. Semantic Web search engines such as Swoogle and Watson currently index several tens of thousands of them; there are also systems specifically designed to support the publication of ontologies, e.g. Cupboard, NCBO Bioportal, and ONKI. Some tools also support editing features, e.g. Neologism, Knoodl. While being a foundation for the Semantic Web, this new environment where ontologies are shared and interlinked online also poses new challenges; fostering thus a number of research projects aiming to understand, amongst others, ontology reuse, storage, publication, versioning, quality control, evaluation, retrieval and modularization. For instance, as part of the EU NeOn project new tools supporting Knowledge Engineering in the age of “networked ontologies” have been developed, while in the EU OASIS project approaches from software engineering and formalization are now also being applied to inter-connect ontologies. Moreover, despite initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly supported; for instance, modularization, versioning, and the relationship between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to support the entire ontology lifecycle.

By the same token, there are several domains making available knowledge resources; for instance, digital libraries such as Pubmed Central offer a large collection of biomedical abstracts and, in some cases, open access to the full document. Some researchers are starting to bridge the gap between clinical and experimental data and literature; such connection is being built via ontologies, some approaches have had BioPortal as their ontology repository. Linked Data is also being explored as a means for publishers to expose their content. Knowledge management over documents is actively aiming to make real the notion of self-descriptiveness; being this intrinsically related to various resources over the web providing meaning for atomic component in documents ?words, tables, figures, maps, etc. In order for these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the realization of repositories providing semantics. In addition, it is now critical to achieve interoperability between these repositories, through common interfaces, standard metadata formats, etc. SERES10 intends to provide such a forum.

SERES is co-located with the ISWC 2010 conference, in Shanghai, China.