1st International Workshop on Hypermedia and the Semantic Web
August 30, 2003 in Nottingham UK
1st International Workshop on Hypermedia and the Semantic WebAugust 30, 2003 in Nottingham UK |
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The Semantic Web provides a range of mechanisms to express relationships between things. These vary in power of expression from the Resource Description Framework through to the three levels of the OWL Web Ontology Language, all available from W3C, while the Semantic Web research community has ventured further into rule languages and beyond.
Hypermedia is also about expressing relationships between things, with models including navigational, spatial, taxonomic and temporal hypermedia. So what is the relationship between hypermedia and the Semantic Web?
This was discussed in a panel at Hypertext 01 in Aarhus, and we are now developing this theme through the Hypermedia and the Semantic Web workshop at Hypertext 03 in Nottingham, UK. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers exploring this relationship to share their current thinking and experiences.
The workshop also builds on the Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) workshop series, which has occurred at the Hypertext conferences over several years. These workshops have explored the world where hypermedia links are expressed and managed separately from the documents to which they refer. The traditional Web linking model, in which links are expressed in HTML, was contrary to this notion of open hypermedia. However, we conjecture that the Semantic Web approach, in which relationships are expressed separately through RDF and ontologies, is highly relevant to open hypermedia . and indeed vice versa.
A means of expressing relationships is important but we need associated tools in order to enjoy the benefits in our applications. The Semantic Web is supported by an underlying service-oriented model such as Web Services or software agents, and tools to support Semantic Web applications are emerging. This provides another parallel with the OHS activity, since in addition to investigating models for expressing links, the previous workshops have addressed the engineering of open hypermedia systems, including the use of link services.
Hence we believe that researchers in each community can learn from the other, and we hope that this new workshop will facilitate this flow of ideas and experience. We equally welcome paper submissions from hypertext practitioners who are using or developing Semantic Web ideas and technologies, and Semantic Web practitioners who are using or developing hypermedia ideas and technologies.
Thus topics include:
The Call for Participation, available as text, or as a html flyer.
The workshop agenda and position papers are available here.
The workshop will take place alongside the ACM Hypertext Conference in Nottingham, UK. More precise location details will appear here once they are available.
The proceedings will be published as a Technical Report from the Electronics and Computer Science Department, University of Southampton, UK.
David De Roure is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He was programme co-chair of WWW2002, is co-chair of the Semantics in Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing Workshop at WWW2003, and ran successful workshops at the International World Wide Web Conferences in Darmstadt and in Paris. He has been an OHS participant for several years.
Jim Hendler is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is also the director of the Semantic Web Research Group and the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory.
David Millard is a Research Fellow in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton. He has participated in the Open Hypermedia Workshops and Working Group meetings since 1997 and was the organiser of OHS2002.
Jacco van Ossenbruggen is a post doctorate researcher with the Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction theme at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Sean Bechhofer is a Research Fellow in the Information Management Group within the University of Manchester Department of Computer Science.
David Millard
Department of Electronics & Computer Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield, Southampton,
SO17 1BJ, UK
dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk