The last days I was at the OTM Conferences 2007 (for the third time) and mainly organized the OnToContent 2007 workshop together with Mustafa Jarrar (supported by the OOA and this year by SOPRANO). Although we had less submissions than the year before, we decided to keep up the quality level (with an acceptance rate of 38%) and rather have less presentations in the workshop. The strategy turned out well, and there was a lot of interaction in the workshop . Unfortunately, this year there was no high quality submission in the HR area, which is a topic particularly of interest to me.
On the ODBASE conference, my colleague Andreas Walter presented his ImageNotion application for collaborative semantic annotation of images (developed in the IMAGINATION project). By the way, Andreas currently conducts an evaluation of the tool and needs as many participants as possible. So if you want to have the chance of winning an iPod Nano with video, participate under www.imagenotion.com/go.
In the breaks, we had some interesting discussions in the “emerging community” of collaborative and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (especially with Pieter De Leenheer from the VU Brussels and Katharina Siorpaes from STI Innsbruck). Katharina presented on a simple, but promising game-based approach to ontology engineering, borrowing ideas from similar games for image annotation with tags.
FInally, OTM local organization was much better than last year 🙂 – no serious issues apart from bad luck with keynote speakers. But Frank Leymann was there to give a very good ad hoc replacement talk.