We are pleased to announce a workshop to be held at Caltech, Pasadena, USA from Monday 18 – Thursday 21 February 2008 on Practical Semantic Astronomy (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast).

What you may ask is Semantic Astronomy, let alone Practical Semantic Astronomy?

Receiving this email, you’ll be aware that there is a sizable international effort working on the Virtual Observatory; there is also a considerably larger worldwide effort to make the Semantic Web a reality and where these two concerns intersect is Semantic Astronomy. As a field, it includes subjects such as metadata for astronomical databases, semantic queries and data mining, astronomical and solar ontologies, knowledgebases, and the application of semantic technologies. The promise for astronomy (and other sciences) includes semantic data access, exploiting distributed annotation and heterogeneous sources, and intelligent data dissemination and discovery. What is particularly exciting is that the Semantic Web has become a set of practical engineering challenges, more concerned with deployment and performance details than AI abstractions, and so we can now start to employ that community’s more successful ideas in astronomy.

The workshop aims to bring together astronomers who are working or interested in the Semantic Web and astronomy.

The first day (Mon 18 Feb) will feature a number of review talks from experts in other fields that have embraced a semantic approach to science (and are streets ahead of astronomy).  We have invited: Katy Borner (Indiana, USA), Peter Fox (HAI/NCAR, USA), Tony Hey (Microsoft), Deborah McGuinness (Stanford, USA), and Mark Wilkinson (UBC, Canada).

The rest of workshop will focus on hearing what activities astronomers are pursuing in this exciting field with lots of opportunities for discussions including the workshop dinner and a semantic social networking exercise on the final morning.

The workshop is limited to 35 attendees and the registration deadline is 31 October 2007. If you want more information or want to register, please go to the website at: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/semast

Scientific Organizing Committee: Elizabeth Auden (MSSL, UK), Sebastien Derriere (CDS, France), Matthew Graham (Caltech, USA), Norman Gray (Leicester/Glasgow, UK), Brian Thomas (Maryland, USA)