Monday, November 06, 2006

International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006), Athens (GA), USA - Day 0


The very first day here at the ISWC...ok, it's the workshop and tutorial day. Officially, the conference will start tomorrow morning with Tom Gruber's keynote. I did already arrive here in Athens at Saturday. The 10 hours flight from Frankfurt was really exhausting...at least I had no stop-over. Athens is about 90 minutes away from Atlanta and it is famous for her university, which is the oldest public funded university of the US. It has a really nice historic campus (I will provide some pictures later on).
Today started with the "1st Semantic Authoring and Annotation Workshop" (SAAW 2006), where I had two papers to present...two day ago I was told (by email) that the short presentations will be 'lightning talks' of 5 minutes length each. I had prepared slides for some 15 minutes talks :) ...and was a little bit 'pissed off' by throwing away all the 'interesting stuff'. But, at least I could raise interest of a few people. The afternoon's workshop (on Web Content Mining with Human Language Technologies) also had some interesting topics. Esp., I liked the talk of Gijs Geleijnse about 'Instance Classification using Co-Occurrences on the Web'. It was about classifying musicians and artists (as instances) with their genre (as concepts) by finding co-occurence relationships of terms with the help of Google.