ESWC, Day One
I’m in Innsbruck, Austria attending the Fourth European Semantic Web Conference. Innsbruck is beautiful, and I wish I had more time to spend here after the conference. I’m putting some photos on flickr in my “ESWC 2007” set. (I think it’s very appropriate that the customary “eswc2007” tag for flickr photos of the conference collides with photos from a gaming conference in Paris (?) using the same tag. Tags don’t work! We need more semantics!)
The first presentation to stand out so far was SPARQLeR: Extended Sparql for Semantic Association Discovery by Krys J. Kochut and Maciej Janik. The work extends SPARQL to allow for arbitrary path queries. Interestingly, the extension makes minimal syntax changes, relying heavily on basic graph patterns and the standard REGEX filter function to express path constraints. The paper gives some really nice example queries using bioinformatics and bibliographic data.