First International Workshop on Semantic Statistics (SemStats 2013)
Deadline for paper submission: Friday, 12 July 2013, 23:59 (Hawaii time)
Notification of acceptance/rejection: Friday, 9 August 2013
Deadline for camera-ready version: Friday, 30 August 2013
From the call for papers:
The goal of this workshop is to explore and strengthen the relationship between the Semantic Web and statistical communities, to provide better access to the data held by statistical offices. It will focus on ways in which statisticians can use Semantic Web technologies and standards in order to formalize, publish, document and link their data and metadata.
The statistical community has recently shown an interest in the Semantic Web. In particular, initiatives have been launched to develop semantic vocabularies representing statistical classifications and discovery metadata. Tools are also being created by statistical organizations to support the publication of dimensional data conforming to the Data Cube specification, now in Last Call at W3C. But statisticians see challenges in the Semantic Web: how can data and concepts be linked in a statistically rigorous fashion? How can we avoid fuzzy semantics leading to wrong analyses? How can we preserve data confidentiality?
The workshop will also cover the question of how to apply statistical methods or treatments to linked data, and how to develop new methods and tools for this purpose. Except for visualisation techniques and tools, this question is relatively unexplored, but the subject will obviously grow in importance in the near future.
An unfortunate emphasis on linked data before understanding the problem of imbuing statistical data with semantics.
Studying the needs of the statistical community for semantics and to what degree would be more likely to yield useful requirements.
And from requirements, then to proceed to find appropriate solutions.
As opposed to arriving solution in hand, with saws, pry bars, shoe horns and similar tools for affixing the solution to any problem.
Thanks for this blogpost. I would like to clarify what you seem to criticize. This workshop is colocated with the semantic web conference and indeed, linked data technologies are promoted in *some* circumstances. Please note that this also reflects what we observe in the statistical community where more and more stakeholders are following this path.
Having said this, we are organizing a workshop where dissent views are more than welcome and actually encouraged, and the purpose of this workshop is certainly NOT to come with a solution before understanding the requirements but instead to better understand what are the needs in terms of semantic representations in the statistical community and conversely, how the semantic web community can benefit from the long experience of the statisticians since it goes more and more towards data mining and analytics.
In a nutshell, the workshop focuses exactly on what you thought was missing.
Comment by troncy — May 3, 2013 @ 5:00 am
troncy,
After seeing your comment, I went back to the call for papers, thinking perhaps I mis-read the call.
There I find (for example):
“The statistics community faces sometimes challenges when trying to adopt Semantic Web technologies, in particular:
difficulty to create and publish linked data: this can be alleviated by providing methods, tools, lessons learned and best practices, by publicizing successful examples and by providing support.
difficulty to see the purpose of publishing linked data: we must develop end-user tools leveraging statistical linked data, provide convincing examples of real use in applications or mashups, so that the end-user value of statistical linked data and metadata appears more clearly.
difficulty to use external linked data in their daily activity: it is important do develop statistical methods and tools especially tailored for linked data, so that statisticians can get accustomed to using them and get convinced of their specific utility.”
So I think my mistake about the focus of the workshop is understandable.
Hope you have a great workshop!
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 3, 2013 @ 8:03 pm