ASIS&T 2005: Day 3

The parallel session – indubitably the most helpful of conference traditions. What could be more sensible than to schedule at precisely the same time the only two sessions (out of more than 60) that include the keyword “ontologies” in their title? What motivation could anyone possibly have for attending both “Science ontologies and the semantic web” and “Metadata and ontologies”? None, obviously, so you can imagine Team Dewey’s jubilation at having to choose between the two. “Science ontologies …” (sponsored by ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group on Scientific and Technical Information Systems, SIG/STI) won the coin-toss, and the highlight was Ralph Hodgson’s measured (and refreshingly jargon-free) tour of meaning quadrants, OWL triples, and knowledge technology trees. Ralph (TopQuadrant, Inc.) cunningly compressed a day-long seminar into 20 minutes, teasing us with the promise of a forthcoming beer ontology (“Beer … is_a … beverage,” anyone?) that will surely revolutionize our understanding of the semantics of the brewing industry. One minor disappointment for Team Dewey was the acronym-per-slide ratio of this session: an average ApS score of 30 really doesn’t cut the mustard in the modern age, and as far we could determine very few of the acronyms used seemed to have been made up specifically for this session – a sad indictment of the current state of R&D in acronym science.