ISWC 2014 is taking place on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy. However, I won’t have much time to relax on the lake. Look out for my tweets (@gray_alasdair).

My conference activities start on Sunday 19 October with the first workshop on Context, Interpretation and Meaning (CIM2014), which together with Harry Halpin (W3C) and Fiona McNeill (Heriot-Watt University) I am a chair. We have managed to put together an interesting selection of 5 papers – two focusing on the context of links, two on the interpretation of alignments and one on the meaning of mappings. I am a co-author on this final paper, but Kerstin Forsberg will be presenting the work [1]. We also have an exciting panel session in store with Aldo Gangemi (CNR), Paul Groth (VU University of Amsterdam) and Harry Halpin.

Also taking place on Sunday is the Linked Science Workshop (LISC). Together with Simon Jupp and James Malone of the EBI we have a paper on modelling the provenance for linksets of convenience [2]. A linkset of convenience is one that does not model the underlying science correctly, but provides a convenient shortcut for linking data. An example from the world of biology is a linkset that directly links genes with their protein product.

On Monday I will be working with the W3C RDF Stream Processing (RSP) Community Group. We have been having regular phone meetings for the last year and have made great progress towards defining a common community model for RDF streams and a query language for processing them. The group will largely be attending the Stream Ordering Workshop and the Semantic Sensor Networks Workshop.

Tuesday is the first day of ISWC, and it is going to be a busy one for me. In the morning I will be presenting the Open PHACTS paper on our work enabling scientific lenses for chemistry data [3]. In the evening I will be at the poster and demonstration session showing off the Open PHACTS VoID Editor [4].

Finally, I am organising the Lightning Talks session on the last day of the conference. This is a session where you can present late breaking results or responses to work presented in the conference. Talks will be 5 minutes each and abstracts can be submitted until 8.30 am on Thursday.

After ISWC I think I’m going to need a break.

@inproceedings{Hussain2014CIM,
Abstract = {Use of medical terminologies and mappings across them are consid- ered to be crucial pre-requisites for achieving interoperable eHealth applica- tions. However, experiences from several research projects have demonstrated that the mappings are not enough. Also the context of the mappings is needed to enable interpretation of the meaning of the mappings. Built upon these experi- ences, we introduce a semantic framework for representing, evaluating and uti- lizing terminology mappings together with the context in terms of the justifica- tions for, and the provenance of, the mappings. The framework offers a plat- form for i) performing various mappings strategies, ii) representing terminology mappings together with their provenance information, and iii) enabling termi- nology reasoning for inferring both new and erroneous mappings. We present the results of the introduced framework using the SALUS project where we evaluated the quality of both existing and inferred terminology mappings among standard terminologies.},
Address = {Riva del Garda, Italy},
Author = {Hussain, Sajjad and Sun, Hong and Erturkmen, Gokce Banu Laleci and Yuksel, Mustafa and Mead, Charles and Gray, Alasdair J G and Forsberg, Kerstin},
Booktitle = {Context Interpretation and Meaning},
Title = {{A Justification-based Semantic Framework for Representing , Evaluating and Utilizing Terminology Mappings}},
url = {http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~fm206/cim14/cim20140_submission_2.pdf},
Month = oct,
Year = {2014}
}