Ontology workshop at FAO

After a very fast taxi course from the Fumicino airport to the center of Rome, IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso reached the FAO premises where they organized the a workshop about the Organic Ontology created for the Organic.Edunet project. It has been a very good opportunity to look closer at what we have been doing during the last 6 months and to improve the current Organic Agriculture and Agreoecology ontology with the help of a bunc of experts from the Organic.Edunet consortium and from FAO. An important part of the meeting was devoted to the presentation of the Moki tool, aimed at easing the collaborative creation and improvement of ontologies. This tool has been created as part of the Aposdle project, whose representative Marco Rospocher participated in the ontology workshop.

In the photo below, UAH members with other participants in the workshop posing in the Philippines room at the FAO building.

From left to right: Nikos Palavitsinis, Alberto Abian, Marco Rospocher and Salvador Sanchez

 

MTSR 2009

Last week, IE members Miguel-Ángel Sicila and Ramiro Cano were attending the MTSR 2009 conference, held in Milan, in the University of Milano-Bicocca. This bianual conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in metadata, its representation, its semantics and its diverse applications to Information Systems.

Apart from the conference, there was a little time for entertainment, including the social dinner which took place at the wonderful location of Grand Hotel Villa Torretta.

From left to right: Ramiro Cano, Miguel-Ángel Sicilia, Cristian Cechinel and Juan Manuel Dodero

 

ITA 2009

This week the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 2009) is taking place in Wrexham, North Wales. ITA is a series of bianual conferences usually held in september, where the athmosphere and the good ambiance between all the participants make of it one of our favourite conferences around.

IE regularly contributes one or more papers reporting on the research being carried out during the last year. In ITA 2009 our presentation was about the integration of semantic web frameworks in SOA architectures (check out the full presentation here).

From left to right: Vic Grout and Rich Picking (conference chairs), Thomas Gottron, Stuart Cunningham and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso

This photo was taken during the mediaeval Welsh banquet celebrated in the Ruthin Castle as part of the social program of the conference. It shows IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso relaxing with our old friends and colleagues of the CAIR research group of the Glyndwr University lead by Prof. Vic Grout (first one from the left) .

 

SSFW09

Last week, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended the SSFW09 workshop, held in Milan, where he presented an approach titled “Integrating Disease And Diagnosis Semantics In Clinical Archetypes”. This workshop was a follow up to the first workshop on Signs, Symptoms and Findings: Towards an Ontology for Clinical Phenotypes held in Dallas in 2008. The aim of both meetings was to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. This Milan edition was organized by the DISCo Bioinformatics Group at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The workshop audience was pleased to watch the presentation of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the ontologies domain, as well as the one of Barry Smith, perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the philosophical approach to the study of ontologies in informatics.

SSFW09 participants

From left to right: Leonardo Lezcano, Gianluca Colombo, Daniele Merico

 

IE members meet Richard Messnarz

This week Dr. Richard Messnarz, executive director of ISCN, visited Alcalá de Henares to attend to Eurospi 2009. IE group was contacted by some members of ISCN to explore paths for collaboration in the framework of the Knowledge Partnership program for Process Improvement that ISCN is carrying out, but also  to exchange ideas on future joint proposals for EU funded projects. Richard and the rest of the people we met were very nice and kind, and very keen to start a collaboration with our group, by the way. In the photo below, chairmen of EuroSPI and IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador sharing table and some friendly conversation in El pollo de Alcala, where we had lunch together.

From left to right: Miklos Biro, Kerstin Siakas, Miguel Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Richard Messnarz.

 

Ontose 2009

Today IE members Daniel Rodriguez and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso are attending to Ontose 2009, the latest edition of a series of bianual workshops on ontologies for information systems and engineering. Ontose was conceived as a forum promoting challenging discussions and cross-fertilization over multidisciplinary research areas from the ontologies point of view.

This year’s edition has has been organized by the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Austria) as part of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems, CAISE 2009. We have been lucky enough as to count with the presence of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the field of ontology in computer science. His keynote on the ontological foundations of Service Science has been not only thought provoking but also very interesting from the point of view of the challenges that the new service-based economy will have to face in the near future. In the photo below these lines, Christian Kop from Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Nicola Guarino and IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso.

 

Open health Spain 2009

Yesterday and today the first Open Health Spain symposium on clinical interoperability issues is taking place in Alcala. Organized by the IE, ATOS Research and Innovation and the Fuenlabrada University Hospital, this symposium aims at gathering together researchers and practitioners in the field of Health interoperability in Spain.

Pablo Serrano (Fuenlabrada Univ. Hospital), Josema Cavanillas (ATOS R&I) and Miguel A. Sicilia (Univ. of Alcala) in the first session

 

Validation of PhD project theses at the University of Cádiz, Spain

Daniel Rodríguez visited Cádiz on 5th Feb, for the validation of some PhD projects. There was a small tornado that afternoon very nearby (San Fernando), but luckly we didn’t notice anything at the hotel… uff!! Thanks to Mercedes Ruiz for sending me the picture!

 

Ph.D. dissertation: Josep Prieto

Miguel-Angel spent a couple of days at Barcelona. Monday it was a meeting of project SUMA. SUMA is about integrating learning technology via OKI interfaces.

Tuesday it was the Ph.D. dissertatio of Josep Prieto Blázquez, a faculty member of the Open University of Catalonia. The Ph.D. was about an ontology for Virtual Laboratories (VLAb), and the results included an ontology-driven generation of VLab arrangements in Moodle.  Below the Ph.D. candidate respectfully listening the veredict of the committee (luckily, the result was positive).

The Ph.D. candidate listening the veredict (the public is at the left, out of the picture)

 

Talking about openness at Miraflores

Last wednesday, Miguel-Angel gave a talk on the concept of openness at Colegio Mayor Miraflores, in Zaragoza, as part of the activities of the “New Technologies” programme the College organizes every year. The slides (in Spanish) have been posted at Manu Benito’s blog:

http://www.memeteka.net/2008/11/profundizando-en-qu-es-abierto.html

In the picture below, left to right Fernando Martín (Microsoft), Jesús Romo (Basque Country Univ.), Miguel-Angel and Oscar González (the chair of the session and organizer of the event). Jesús spoke about the history and pitfalls of Creative Commons licenses, and Fernando about open source and proprietary software (a curious relation :-/).