Initiative in Innovative Computing @ Harvard Seminar Series Wednesday, January 31, 2007; 4:00pm 60 Oxford Street, Room 330 Professor Carole Goble, The University of Manchester, UK Seminar Title: Sense and Sensibility: Adding meaning to metadata for manageable middleware Abstract It is a truth universally acknowledged that a grid application in possession of good middleware, must be in want of meaningful metadata. We have seen a variety of projects and programmes of activity that have promoted systematic approaches to describing, linking and sharing metadata, particularly through the use of community-wide terminologies or ontologies. Life Sciences have led the way. The founding of the USA’s National Centre for BioMedical Ontology (http://www.bioontology.org <http://www.bioontology.org/>) is an example. The Semantic Web has given distributed information management a technical impetus, and once again the Life Sciences are pioneers. Meanwhile, the Semantic Grid initiative attempts to marry the two technical efforts of Grid Middleware and Web-wide Information Management to generally support better metadata (and data) management for Science applications and the infrastructure that underpins them. Again, early examples such as myGrid are found in the Life Sciences. Recent work on a Semantic Open Grid Service Architecture (S-OGSA) lays the foundation for a systematic yet lightweight approach to deploying semantics into new and legacy Grid middleware. In this talk I will share my experiences of applying Semantic Web and ontology based approaches to represent and classify metadata and discuss the Semantic Grid using the S-OGSA as an illustration. I’ll also take the opportunity to voice some concerns and raise some challenges that we have to overcome, not many of which are technical. Upcoming IIC seminars Continue to stay up to date with our IIC Seminar Schedule. Parking is available in the 52 Oxford Street Garage. Please tell the attendant that you are attending the IIC Seminar. _______________________________________________ iic-seminars mailing list iic-seminars(a)calists.harvard.edu http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-seminars