FWD: Practical Semantic Astronomy 09 -- FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

[Kirk D Borne]

**Apologies for duplicate copies**


Practical Semantic Astronomy 09 -- FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

2-5 March 2009

Glasgow, UK

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/



It's now just a little under a month to the second Practical Semantic  
Astronomy workshop.  The programme is online at <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/programme.shtml 
 >, and it promises to be an interesting and hugely valuable workshop,  
with lots of cross-fertilisation between the broad range of  
participants.

The workshop should be of interest to people working in semantic  
technologies generally, as well as science data specialists, as we'll  
be examining challenging concrete use-cases, covering discipline- 
specific linked open data, reasoning about data, and semantic search.

Plus, Glasgow's a great city!

We look forward to seeing you in March.






Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery  
potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling  
natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata  
markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections,  
and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of  
workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008. The workshop brings  
together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic  
technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these  
techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics.

The Virtual Observatory is a loose planet-wide collaboration of  
astronomy computing projects, aiming to make available the high-volume  
and rich data of astronomy. Although astronomical data is generally  
well-described, it is very dispersed, so that there is a substantial  
data-discovery and integration problem, making it fertile ground for  
the sorts of semantic approaches applied with such success in other  
disciplines.

In SemAst 2009, we will pair keynote speakers and astronomical use- 
cases, focusing broad expertise on challenging and exciting problems  
in astroinformatics. The keynotes speakers will be:

  * Danny Ayers, Talis, UK
  * Peter Fox, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
  * Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  * Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, France
  * Joel Sachs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
  * Robert Stevens, University of Manchester, UK

Topics of Interest

  * Astronomy and solar ontologies
  * Knowledgebases
  * Metadata for astronomical databases
  * Semantic integration
  * Semantic queries and data mining
  * Semantic technologies
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