The Workshop proceeding are now available here

First Workshop on Semantic Interoperability in the European Digital Library

2nd June - Tenerife, Spain

To be held as part of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (1-5 June 2008)

One of Europe’s current most important initiatives is the construction of the European Digital Library (EDL), which aims at making Europe's diverse cultural and scientific heritage (books, films, maps, photographs, music, etc.) easy to access and use for work, leisure, or study. EDL will take advantage of existing rich European heritage, including multicultural and multilingual environments, of technological advances and of new business models. It will generate a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed digital cultural heritage, including all types of multimedia cultural content, and all types of cultural institutions, including libraries, museums, archives. The short-term objective of the European Digital Library is to create a prototype within 2008, providing multilingual access to over 2 million digital objects, focusing on libraries, while including as many museums and archives it is possible. The long-term objective, for 2010 is to increase the available digital content to over 6 million digital objects from all types of institutions, i.e., libraries, museums, audiovisual organisations, archives.

Several definitions of semantic interoperability have been proposed in the literature, covering different application domains. In this Workshop, we focus on how the late advances on Semantic Web technologies can facilitate the way that European digital libraries exchange information within the framework of the web. The key in the definition of semantic interoperability is the common automatic interpretation of the meaning of the exchanged information, i.e. the ability to automatically process the information in a machine-understandable manner. The first step of achieving a certain level of common understanding is a representation language that exchanges the formal semantics of the information. Then, systems that understand these semantics, such as reasoning tools, ontology querying engines, can process the information and provide web services like searching, retrieval etc. Semantic Web technologies provide the user with a formal framework for the representation and processing of different levels of semantics. Such technologies include W3C standards like RDF, OWL, SKOS, ontology editing, reasoning and mapping tools.

The CFP in PDF format can be found here.