Workshop and Symposium on Semantic Physical Science

We are delighted to announce that we are running a Workshop and Symposium on Semantic Physical Science (see below). This will explore how to use physical scientific data in semantic form and will explore: creation by humans and machines, specifications including dictionaries/schemas, writing and using code (Java, FORTRAN), creating semantic data/annotation, data repositories, and publication/re-use.

We are encouraged by the success of a 1-day workshop we ran in Melbourne last month where we explored the ideas and technology. The feedback was very positive, suggesting that the time has come for Physical Science to embrace semantics. Common components are dictionaries, units of measurement, errors, metadata and the workshop/symposium will explore how to create and use these. We are also encouraged by a recent JISC/OKF/W3C-SWAT4LS life sciences hackathon that we helped to run (which showed that substantial progress can be made in 2-3 days)

This workshop is made possible by support from EPSRC. Please feel free to mail this to other scientific groups and organizations and mailing lists, especially in chemistry, earth and materials sciences.

Workshop and Symposium on Semantic Physical Science, Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics, Cambridge UK (2012-01-10/12)

We are running a hands-on workshop (January 10th/11th 2012) and symposium (January 12th 2012) on Semantic Physical Science, supported by EPSRC (“Pathways to Impact”). At these events, we will be investigating how semantic technologies (dictionaries, mark-up languages, ontologies, data-typing) can be applied to the capture, publication, preservation and re-use of data in the physical sciences (especially chemistry and materials science). We have invited 25 scientists (particularly from the fields of crystallography/solid state, analytical spectroscopy and computational chemistry; see list below) to a two-day workshop where we will review and create toolkits and protocols. We are delighted to see very great interest from national laboratories and national providers of services.

The results of the workshop and general talks on semantic principles will be presented at the full day symposium, which will be of particular interest to creators of chemical software, publishers, repository managers and funders who encourage data publication. The symposium is open to everyone without charge. The approximate program will be released shortly but some details will reflect the progress made in the preceding workshop. There will be significant time for discussion. If you wish to attend the symposium, please email spsworkshop@gmail.com to register; places are limited to 50 – first come, first served!

Please distribute this flyer to anyone who you feel may be interested.

There may be one or two places still available in the workshop – please email spsworkshop@gmail.com for information.

Confirmed attendees:

Nico Adams (CSIRO), Simon Coles (University of Southampton), Clyde Davies (Microsoft), Bert de Jong (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Martin Dove (University of Cambridge/Queen Mary University of London), Jorge Estrada (Zaragoza Scientific Center for Advanced Modeling), Marcus Hanwell (Kitware), Marcus Kraft (University of Cambridge), Mahendra Mahey (JISC), Brian McMahon (IUCr), Karl Mueller (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Weerapong Phadungsukanan (University of Cambridge), Henry Rzepa (Imperial College), William Shelton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Paul Sherwood (STFC Daresbury Laboratory), Michael Simmons (University of Cambridge), Christoph Steinbeck (EBI), Jens Thomas (STFC Daresbury Laboratory), Andrew Walker (University of Bristol), Alex Wade (Microsoft), Nancy Washton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ), Mark Williamson (University of Cambridge), Erica Yang (Science and Technology Facilities Council)