The 7th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2008 , is held in Karlsruhe, a beautiful city in the south west of Germany. I attend the conference to present our joint work with IBM Software group on MDS++, Supporting ontology-based dynamic property and classification in Websphere Metadata Server. There are more than 600 participants and 70 papers in ISWC 2008, which demonstrates the growing attentions and interests to Semantic Web.
One observeration is that robust and scalable RDF/RDFS storage systems are being deployed, based on the demos at the billion triples challenge. The first place went to the SemaPlore which allows users to explore and visualize a very large volume of heterogeneous data; the second place went to the SearchWebDB by the joint work of SJTU and AIFB, which allows to translate keyword-based search to structured query and perform distributed query processing. The third place went to MaRVIN (Massive RDF Versatile Inference Network), which is a parallel and distributed platform for performing RDF(S) inference on a network of loosely coupled machines using a peer-to-peer model.
Another observation is that Semantic Web needs to be more "Web-oriented" with light-weight semantics and scalabity in nature, rather than "Semantic-oriented" that uses powerful DL languages and reasoning. The interesting panel discussion on "is OWL 2 Far" and the industry talk on semantic wiki are evidences on this trend.
A good news is that Shanghai JiaoTong University and IBM China Research Lab will host the ISWC 2010 in Shanghai. Haofeng Wang and I have made the presentation to the SWSA members on Oct. 27 evening. Finally, we have won the final defence with the score of 12 : 0. All memebers from Semantic Web Science Association select us as the right host to organize ISWC 2010.
As usual, there are many Chinese participants. We took a picture for most of the attendees.
As our lovely Jing is back from U.S., and it is approaching the year end, our dear guotong decided to organize a team building. Considering the limited time, the final decision is to have dinner first, followed by two hour badminton session. It is pity that teacher qiu has the badminton session on Saturday morning, thus could not accept our invitation on Friday night. We hope we could watch Da kuan VS Teacher qiu sometime.
The dinner is taken at Su Zhao Ji sour soup fish restaurant. Teacher qiu is such a good story teller, thus we have heard many interesting stuffs that covering a broad of domains.
For our badminton session, we have three main observations: (1) da kuan’s skill proves his confidence (2) guotong is a man with very strong power, so a little fat is useful J (3) to be a man should keep low-key. The two guys that claimed to beat our team is beaten by guotong and da kuan with 21 : 5.
first of all, i admit i am now feeling a bit jet lag... i know, it is 3:50 AM in the Sunday early morning, Nov. 16, 2008. i slept and woke up, totally confusing my biological clock. anyway, Jing is fine -- as i always said... nothing is worse than doing nothing... my new philosophy of work and life... time to show up my climbing days.
1. WRC consists of three branches, one in Hawthorn (New York) where i stayed, one in Yorktown (New York) where our Chief Research Officers work, and the other in Cambridge (Boston) where i did not visit.
This is the parking ground of WRC Hawthorn and the lobby is not far away.
This is the building of WRC Yorktown which is round and i failed to get its overview.
2. New York City: I visited twice, one for the Metropolitan Museum and central park, and the other for Govenance Island.
This is the Metropolitan Museum where it took us 4 hours for only one gallery, and i heard another guy visited there four times so as to enjoy the feast of art. BTW: this museum is free for IBMer -- Remember to take your IBM badge when you are there :)
This is the Central Park -- i love sunshine and the tranquility.
This is one building in Govenance Island. This island is not always open for public, and we captured the chance while not visiting the most famous Statue of Liberty which locates in another island.
This is Statue of Liberty, and a yacht with tourists drove there.
3. Coldspring hiking: i went there twice, one in green season and the other in red season.
This is the lake under the mountain -- you see, green :)
This is the wood inside the moutain -- you see, red :)
Well... 5:00 AM now... i am feeling sleepy again... back to my dreams :)
This is really a delayed blog for our Spring team outing at May, but the interesting pictures are still clear in my memory The everyone expected spring outing finally comes at May. Upon the calling of our dear Pan Core, our I&K team plans to go to the white goat valley at ChangPing district in the Friday afternoon. We were heading for there at 11am in four cars, taking the most famous highway Badaling highway which is voted as the slowest highway in China. It did not surprise us that the traffic jam was encountered... luckily that the traffic jam is not that serious and we arrived at the white goat valley at around 12:30pm. More clear sky, more fresh air, green mountains surrounded, and most important, no codings, no papers, no projects, what a cozy afternoon!!! Although we were all hungry already, still need to wait for the restaurant to prepare for the food. Some people started to play football in the small courtyard of the restaurant. I have not touched the football for a long time, and could not help to join them, and then produced the most accurate kick in my life. The ball just hit a boy's head, and made him in crying loudly. I was never so accurate even when i kicked the penalty!! The boy was crying his heart out, and i was so guilty:(
To avoid hurting others, haozi, feng, xiaoyuan and I started to play the poker "tractor". With the joining of our bosses li and tong, we switched to "zhao peng you". There is no managers on the poker tables, although li got very good cards, it can not prevent that somebody with very bad cards to be his partners. Until the lunch is ready, li was still stay at his entry level. Comfort him!
After the lunch, the game session started, frisbee, kite, bicycle, football, etc, at the river side. Our male colleagues, most of whom were above 30, started a very "childish" game, to see who could throw the stone farthest into the river. Maybe being IT workers keeps us young! Surprisingly, the thinnest guy keeps the farthest record and somebody, prepared for a long time, rolling his arm for several times, and gave up finally.
The killing game could not be missed when many people gathering, and it proved again that somebody that looks honest could not be trusted, and they are likely to kill their close ones first. It also proves again that I am likely to be treated as killer. Am I looked like such kind of guys? ai, I need to be more gentle as a woman.
The rain stopped our killing, but it did not keep for long. Around 20 minutes, the sun came out again. We decided to head for the deep of the valley. Pan core took us to a place with a heap of different shapes of big stones. Can you imagine, in the quiet valley, a team of monkeys were happily climbing up and down among these stones. The last stop in the valley is the “fairy cave”. Somebody pointed us that a fairy cave is in the hill. We started to find the fairy cave under the leading of brother hu，went through the bosk, climbed up the mountain, even the girl with high heel sandal, what a beautiful view! Reaching the peak of the mountain, looking down on other hills. But, but…., where is the fairy cave!! Fairy is not that easy to be found:) Thanks to our camera men, da kuan and haozi, who contributed so many wonderful and interesting photos. Do not miss our team outing video!
Happy time flies. On the road back to home, we already started to expect the next outing!!
Data warehouse is now widely used in business analysis and decision making processes. To adapt the rapidly changing business environment, we develop Enterprise Information Asset Workbench (EIAW) to make data warehouses more business-friendly by using Semantic Web technologies. The main idea is to make business semantics explicit by uniformly representing the business metadata (i.e. conceptual data model and multidimensional model) with an extended OWL language. Then a mapping from the business metadata to the schema of the data warehouse is built. When an analysis request is raised, a customized data mart with data populated from the data warehouse can be automatically generated with the help of this built-in knowledge.
A powerpoint demo of the EIAW tool is available as below.
The 6th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007, is held in Bushan, Korea. I attend the conference to present our joint work with Taikang Life insurance company on EIAW, Towards a Business-friendly Data Warehouse Using Semantic Web Technologies. There are more than 500 participants and 70 papers in ISWC 2007, which demonstrates the growing attention and interest to Semantic Web. The keynote from Powerset sounds a very disruptive approach for web search, by applying question-answering technologies. Chris Welty from IBM Watson gives an interesting talk to rethink the focus and road map of Semantic Web technologies, and the example of motivating people, kind of an extension to the current web, to take some computation tasks are really amazing. One notable phenomenon is the presence of Chinese people. There are around 15 papers from Chinese people, including authors from Chinese universities (especially APEX lab from Shanghai Jiaotong University), research labs (IBM CRL) and students studying abroad. By the way, the food in Bushan is very good, and you can find some pictures of Bushan, and its food, at my personal blog in Chinese.
The First China Semantic Web Symposium, CSCW2007, is held in Beijing. There are many Semantic Web researchers coming, national and international. Invited speakers are Dr. Ivan Herman and Dr. Chris Welty. Other presenters are either professors from top universities in China, or domain experts. Also, student attendees are quite active -- they discuss and self-introduce to others. I helps to organize the symposium and Guotong Xie, lead of our Semantic Integration Team, gives a talk, titled as Semantic Metadata Projects in CRL. The slides are available at Publication Page
I have been joining IBM CRL for about three weeks, from the official on-board day, September 17th, 2007. These days I watch this company, the people around me and list something I think interesting.
1. It takes me about TWO WEEKS to finish countless paper work as a new employee. :-( 2. People here do not wear suits and ties as I thought. Instead, you can see T-shirts and jeans everywhere. a result of localization? :-) 3. The major color inside IBM buiding is NOT blue or gray, it is something like light yellow. :-) 4. From my personal point, the food (buffet) here is of great variety and delicious, and cheap. :-):-) 5. No strict attendance requirement. :-):-):-) 6. No parking fee! :-):-):-)
July 3rd, 2007, is the day when I officially became an IBMer, working on the Semantic Integration team at CRL. Previously, I have ever been an intern, from February to June in 2006, also, from March to July in 2007. No doubtly, those days impressed me a lot, moving me to the way on a great Blue Career. Lean More and Contribute More -- I know here I am :)
