Identity and Reference on the Semantic Web 2008

Workshop date: June 2nd, 2008

Abstract

The recent developments of the Semantic Web - and the fast rise of Web2.0 applications - make more and more evident that the problem of identity and reference through URIs on the Semantic Web is perhaps the single most important issue for reaching a global scale. So far, there is little agreement on how this problem should be addressed and solved, instead uniqueness of objects and the correctness of references has often been taken as granted without caring about potential problems with this assumption.

This workshop tries to address the issue by involving the key players in the area and providing a platform for discussing approaches and preliminary solutions.

Workshop topic and content

The recent developments of the Semantic Web – and the fast rise of Web2.0 applications – make more and more evident that the problem of identity and reference on the Semantic Web is perhaps the single most important issue for reaching a global scale. Initiatives like LinkedData, OntoWorld and the large number of proposals aiming at using popular URLs (e.g. Wikipedia's) as “canonical” URIs (especially for non informational resources) show that a solution to this issue is very urgent and very relevant. Indeed, solving this issue would enable and foster the decentralized and open publication of data on the Semantic Web, would allow better and faster semantic search engines, would be the basis for a new generation of Semantic Web browsers, would start the development of smarter applications on the Web. Other vertical (and often commercial) initiatives (like LSID, DOI, etc.) prove that there is also a practical and business potential in a standard solution.

So far, there is little agreement on how this problem should be addressed and solved. On the one hand we need to address technical issues, such as: how do we make sure that people and applications can find and reuse pre-existing URIs for different types of entity? Is HTTP the most appropriate addressing scheme for these URIs? Should URIs for commonly identified entities, like people, organizations or countries, be managed by a central service?); on the other hand, we also face trust, security and privacy issues, such as: what if the same URI is used to make contradictory or undesired statements about an entity? Do people really want that a single URIs is consistently used to represent knowledge about them on the Web? What if this becomes a way to trace people, companies or groups? Are centralized registries of URIs for different types of entities, such as a Semantic Wikipedia, necessary, or can it be built in a decentralized manner while still linking data? How can the Web avoid homogeneity and excessive fragmentation?

The result of this situation is that, despite the high level of awareness in the community, the potential for data level integration of information currently published on the Semantic Web is still mostly unexploited. FOAF profiles do not have canonical and reusable URIs for pointing to people one knows (only ad hoc solutions are available, like the email hashcode); the most popular ontology editors mint new URIs for any newly started OWL project; social networks are not easily portable; social tagging is not semantically precise.

Starting from such a situation, the workshop aims at collecting contributions which can roughly be grouped as follows:

• Foundations: formal and conceptual theories of identity and reference for the Semantic Web
• Vision papers: visionary solutions to the problems of identity and reference
• Project papers: descriptions of research & development projects in this area
• Experiences: contributions from research and industry that illustrate case studies or approaches to deal with the issues of identity
• and reference
• Critical viewpoints: discussions of advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approaches

We especially encourage contributions from groups or organizations which are working on putting together big semantic data collections in order to compare the different practical solutions which were found for integrating semantic data from different sources.

Workshop's anticipated outcome

The anticipated outcome of the workshop is to assess the state of the art in the area, as well as to discuss the approach and evaluate critically the next steps in pursuing this topic. There is the potential for creating the core of a consortium for future R&D projects on the topic for both academia and industry.

Accepted Papers

• Giovanni Tummarello and Renaud Delbru. Entity Coreference Resolution Services in Sindice.com: Identification on the current Web of Data
• Andriy Nikolov, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta and Anne de Roeck. Handling instance coreferencing in the KnoFuss architecture
• Afraz Jaffri, Hugh Glaser and Ian Millard. Managing URI Synonymity to Enable Consistent Reference on the Semantic Web
• Tomi Kauppinen, Riikka Henriksson, Reetta Sinkkil, Robin Lindroos, Väätäinen and Eero Hyvönen. Ontology-based Disambiguation of Spatiotemporal Locations
• David Booth. Why URI Declarations? A comparison of architectural approaches
• Alfio Ferrara, Davide Lorusso and Stefano Montanelli. Automatic Identity Recognition in The Semantic Web
• Junaid Ahsenali Chaudhry, Themis Palpanas, Periklis Andritsos and Antonio Maña. Entity Lifecycle Management for OKKAM
• Harry Halpin. The Principle of Self-Description: Identity Through Linking
• Alexander Löser, Wojciech M. Barczynski and Falk Brauer. What's the intention behind your query? A few observations from a large developer community
• Julien Gaugaz and Gianluca Demartini. Entity Identifiers for Lineage Preservation

Workshop Program

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Organizers

• Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy
• Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Heiko Stoermer, University of Trento, Italy
• Giovanni Tummarello, DERI Galway, Ireland

Program Committee

Karl Aberer, EPFL
Chris Bizer, Freie Universität Berlin
David Booth, HP
Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo
Richard Cyganiak, DERI Galway
Anita De Waard, Elsevier
Stefan Decker, DERI Galway
Aldo Gangemi, CNR
Hugh Glaser,, University of Southampton
Andreas Hart DERI Galway
Tom Heath, Talis Information Ltd
Kingsley Idehen, OpenLink Software
Pierre Levy, University of Ottawa
Alexander Löser, SAP Research
Antonio Mana, University of Malaga
Christian Morbidoni, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche
Claudia Niederée, L3S Research Center
Themis Palpanas, University of Trento
Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons US
Matthias Samwald, DERI Galway
Leo Sauermann, DFKI
Henry Thompson, University of Edinburgh UK
Marco Varone, ExpertSystem IT
Bernard Vatant, Mondeca FR