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