Practical Semantic Astronomy workshop

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

Firstly apologies if you get multiple copies of this email but we are 
trying to hit as wide an audience as possible.

We are pleased to announce a workshop to be held at Caltech, Pasadena, 
USA from Monday 18 - Thursday 21 February 2008 on Practical Semantic 
Astronomy (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast).

What you may ask is "Semantic Astronomy", let alone "Practical Semantic 
Astronomy"?

Receiving this email, you'll be aware that there is a sizable 
international effort working on the Virtual Observatory; there is also a 
considerably larger worldwide effort to make the Semantic Web a reality 
and where these two concerns intersect is Semantic Astronomy. As a 
field, it includes subjects such as metadata for astronomical databases, 
semantic queries and data mining, astronomical and solar ontologies, 
knowledgebases, and the application of semantic technologies. The 
promise for astronomy (and other sciences) includes semantic data 
access, exploiting distributed annotation and heterogeneous sources, and 
intelligent data dissemination and discovery. What is particularly 
exciting is that the Semantic Web has become a set of practical 
engineering challenges, more concerned with deployment and performance 
details than AI abstractions, and so we can now start to employ that 
community's more successful ideas in astronomy.

The workshop aims to bring together astronomers who are working or 
interested in the Semantic Web and astronomy.

The first day (Mon 18 Feb) will feature a number of review talks from 
experts in other fields that have embraced a semantic approach to 
science (and are streets ahead of astronomy).  We have invited: Katy 
Borner (Indiana, USA), Peter Fox (HAI/NCAR, USA), Tony Hey (Microsoft), 
Deborah McGuinness (Stanford, USA), and Mark Wilkinson (UBC, Canada).

The rest of workshop will focus on hearing what activities astronomers 
are pursuing in this exciting field with lots of opportunities for 
discussions including the workshop dinner and a semantic social 
networking exercise on the final morning.

The workshop is limited to 35 attendees and the registration deadline is 
31 October 2007. If you want more information or want to register, 
please go to the website at: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast

    Regards,

    The Scientific Organizing Committee (Elizabeth Auden (MSSL, UK), 
Sebastien Derriere (CDS, France), Matthew Graham (Caltech, USA), Norman 
Gray (Leicester/Glasgow, UK), Brian Thomas (Maryland, USA))