News en vrac
I had no idea how to say en vrac in English five minutes ago, and now that I have looked at several dictionaries, I am still unsure. So I used the French expression. In French, something is en vrac when it is composed of several (a lot, generally), unsorted and heterogeneous elements.
I haven't written anything here for a long time, so this is a bunch of unsorted, heterogeneous (kind of) news, about the server, current activities and some things with the word dynamic in them.
- Monday Marc introduced Marta and me to Stowe Boyd, describing him as a Semantic Web sceptic. We did our usual respective presentations/discussions (Marta on Ontology Matching and folksonomies, and me on Watson and Ontology Modularization; we are becoming quite good at that), but at the end, I am not sure we convinced him (at least for my part. Maybe we are a bit too much oriented towards people who share our opinion about the potential of the Semantic Web...). The good thing is that Marc linked the Watson website on his blog (see Catchin up w Stowe Boyd…). It made me realized that the website wasn't working well (thanks Sean and Marc). This is also a good opportunity to test the trackback feature of this blog system :-)
- I spent most of the day today in dealing with the organization of IWOD, the International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics (see the website). You may think that there is no direct relation with Watson. This is exactly the point here: There should be a relation between Watson and ontology evolution. The good news is that it will... see next bullet.
- We are now activly looking for new PhD students for September 2007 (see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/examples.cfm). Two of the possible projects are about dynamic aspects of the Semantic Web and directly rely on Watson. Briefly, the Dynamics of the Semantic Web project is about integrating features for tracking evolution of ontologies in Watson, and the Harvesting Knowledge for Supporting Dynamic Ontology Evolution project is about using Watson for supporting ontology evolution (OK, I said briefly... read the projects: they are just terribly more exciting than what I can tell in one sentence). So if you plan to get a PhD position, hurry up, the deadline is on the 15th of April!
- We have to take a look to the OWL support in Oracle 11g and to Mulgara... yes, we have to...
- Finally, about the server... well, hopefully some good news tomorow...