SemAst 2009

Second International Workshop on Practical Semantic Astronomy

2-5 March 2009

Glasgow, UK.

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

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 will comprise of: - 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 - +1 to be confirmed

Topics of Interest

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

Submission

Submissions should be in the form of an extended abstract of no more than 1 page. Abstracts should be mailed to Norman Gray (norman at astro dot gla dot ac dot uk) with the email subject "SemAst 2009 paper".

Important Dates

Abstract Submissions: 4 January 2009 Paper Notification: 16 January 2009 Early-bird Registration: 31 January 2009 Workshop: 2-5 March 2009

Organisers

Alasdair J G Gray, University of Glasgow, UK Norman Gray, University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK Jon Ritchie, University of Glasgow, UK

Scientific Organising Committee

Norman Gray (Chair), University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK Kirk Borne, George Mason University, USA Doug Burke, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA Sebastien Derriere, Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France Matthew Graham, California Institute of Technology, USA Bob Mann, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK

Further Information

More information is available from the web site http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/ or by email to semast09 at dcs.gla.ac.uk	 This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP