Monday, June 1st 2009, Heraklion, Crete
From Roadmap
Contents |
Report on the 3rd STI International Roadmapping Workshop: „Charting the future of semantic technologies“
Following two roadmapping workshops involving STI experts, the third workshop opened the discussion to the wider semantics research and application community and was co-located at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2009 in Heraklion, Crete.
Under the subtitle „How will semantic technologies be used in 2024?“ the workshop asked the question, given how in the last 15 years the World Wide Web has radically changed how our society communicates, connects, does business, shares information and performs tasks, how will computing change in the next 15 years, and what role will semantic technologies play in that?
The discussion was kicked off by the invited expert Prof. Dr. Fabio Ciravegna, of the University of Sheffield and also Service Co-ordinator for the STI International Roadmapping Service. His talk entitled „Six Impossible Things“ laid out a challenging vision of an expansion in computing power, digital storage and Internet-accessing devices in the next 15 years. Selecting certain futurist views on technology in 2024 such as nano-implants, he showed how we need to think big if we are to think about the place of semantics 15 years from now.
Two further presentations solicited by a public call for submissions took place, delving down into two specific technology directions which will grow in significance in the next 15 years:
- 1.A joint roadmap for semantic technologies and the Internet of Things, Ioan Toma, Elena Simperl and Graham Hench (STI Innsbruck and STI International): considered the challenges in research that arise when (nearly) everything is on the Internet and consuming and providing data, and the potential of semantic technologies to organize and mediate between the large scales of data which result;
- 2.Future Challenge: Fast and Reliable Aggregation of Information from Ubiquituous Data Streams, Catherina Burghart, Andreas Abecker and Rudi Studer (FZI Research Center for Information Technology): followed on from the topic of Internet of Things into the ubiquitous data streams that those things would be generating, and how the information in those streams may be extracted and shared with others in an automated fashion taking privacy and trust issues into account (supported by semantics).
These talks were followed by a group of international experts, including representatives from the United Nations FAO, Malaysia and Australia. In an open discussion with the group, many points were raised, inspired from the presentations:
- the gradual convergence of the digital and real world, and semantics as a means to model complex events;
- the dangers of omnipresent data and the need for (semantic) technology to identify untrusted information, sensor errors, deception etc.;
- the need to fill the gap between knowledge experts and the „farmer in the field“ whose knowledge should be modelled, if semantics are to ever come out of their high tower and down to e.g. agriculture in the developing world.
Finally, an interactive session took place involving the participants sharing their visions for semantics in terms of emerging application areas of semantics over the next 15 years, as well as the semantic and non-semantic technologies whose maturity and mainstream uptake would combine to generate new use cases in those application areas. The session generated some new ideas for application areas and technologies in addition to those identified in the previous workshops:
- Application areas - Augmented Education, Smart Home, Robotics, Agriculture
- Technologies - Knowledge verification, Smart Grids, Recommendation Systems, Knowledge engineering
In conclusion, the vision for 2024 which formed during the workshop could be seen as being less utopian about the future than the results for 2014 and 2019, with a recognition of the breakthroughs which may be reached in terms of capturing semantic data about almost everything in the world and making it available everywhere and at every time. Combined with the potential for large scale inference, it may be that too much knowledge can become accessible, and there is an imperative for semantic technology researchers to also consider and tackle the challenges of preserving privacy and trust in a semantic world (where previously unforeseen knowledge becomes inferable from combining heterogeneous and separate data sets).
Position papers
A joint roadmap for semantic technologies and the Internet of Things, Ioan Toma, Elena Simperl and Graham Hench (STI Innsbruck and STI International)
Future Challenge: Fast and Reliable Aggregation of Information from Ubiquituous Data Streams, Catherina Burghart, Andreas Abecker and Rudi Studer (FZI Research Center for Information Technology)
Presentations
Six Impossible Things, Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield)
A joint roadmap for semantic technologies and the Internet of Things, Ioan Toma, Elena Simperl and Graham Hench (STI Innsbruck and STI International)
Future Challenge: Fast and Reliable Aggregation of Information from Ubiquituous Data Streams, Catherina Burghart, Andreas Abecker and Rudi Studer (FZI Research Center for Information Technology)
Application area/technology boards
TBD