While we are warming up and working out our spin-off's showcase for SemTech09 in June in the Valley, Tony Shaw invited us to write an article for his revamped Semantic Universe blog. You can find the whole article here. Here is the summary:

Exploration of the Intersection between Ontologies, Medical Imaging, and human Anatomy.

The research will take place at STARlab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, within the framework of the European Marie Curie Research and Training Network entitled 3D Anatomical Human.

STARLab's spinoff Collibra is proud to present a case study at I.T. Works' seminar on semantics.

I.T. Works is an organization that has been organizing seminars and workshops on technical and business IT topics for more than 15 years. Their events are high-quality, information-packed, vendor-independent and provide solutions to the problems that IT professionals face today.

This seminar provides an introduction in the world of linked data and semantics. It explains how to:

More info will follow later once the conference website and programme is complete. General information can be found here: http://www.semantic-conference.com/

STARLab's spinoff Collibra was selected as one of the 19 SMEs to exhibit at ICT 2008 in Lyon. The ICT 2008 event presented Europe's priorities for ICT research, development and funding. Many of STARLab's project partners also attended the event.

Today we throw a goodbye party for Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Chang, who did an excellent collaborative work as a STARLab’s visiting researcher for more than three weeks.

for the complete article go to: http://www.datanews.be/nl/news/90-112-20461/tolk-te-midden-van-de-informatiewarboel.html

VUB STARLab invites you to a *free-of-charge* two-day international workshop on "Web Information systems 2.0? Social, Economical, and Technological Challenges". The event will take place on 17 and 18 September 2008 on the South-Brussels based campus of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). The detailled programme can be found in the attached attached PDF file.

On the first day, this workshop features a number of invited talks, each addressing relevant challenges in architecting next -generation web-information systems. We particularly focus on the socio-economical and collaborative aspects. The invited speakers are senior experts in the field including Gerd Stumme (Germany), Robert Meersman (Belgium), Tharam Dillon (Australia), Martin Hepp (Germany), Elizabeth Chang (Australia), and Pieter De Leenheer (Belgium). The second day of the workshop is dedicated to extended discussions, which will be initiated by a panel consisting of the aforementioned invited speakers. In the afternoon, there will be an plenty of time to brainstorm about the identified challenges and opportunities. Summarising, in combination with traditional Belgian beer and cuisine: a splendid occasion to meet new people and create promising scientific relationships ! We also plan to publish the talks and conclusions from the workshop together with an additional number of invited papers.

Registrations are *free-of-charge*, but are limited, and should be confirmed before 15 September 2008. To register please send an email with subject "registration seminar information systems 2.0", and you name and affiliation in the body, to jberghma@vub.ac.be.

The workshop takes place on the VUB Etterbeek Campus, building E, room 0.06.

Travel directions to the VUB Etterbeek Campus can be found here: http://www.vub.ac.be/english/infoabout/campuses/index.html

Hotel & tourist information can be found on the official website of Brussels.

If you would have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us (jberghma@vub.ac.be).

We are looking forward to meeting you in Brussels !

STARLab proudly looks back at ten years of application-oriented research into semantic technology, which fruitfully resulted in a suite of methods, and tools. Since two months, STARLab is being reinforced by its brand new spin-off company Collibra nv/sa. Together they will clear the sky for even more meaningful internet systems, empowered by tangible and dynamic semantics. Pieter De Leenheer and Stijn Christiaens will publish a vision and mission statement at the international Future Internet Symposium, 28th September - 30th September 2008, to be held in Vienna, Austria.

Pieter De Leenheer will present a case study on ontology-based competency-centric HR Management at the European Semantic Technology Conference 2008 in Vienna, Austria. The case study was conducted within the EC-funded Leonardo DaVinci project CODRIVE.

More info: http://www.estc2008.com

VUB STARLab currently has vacancies for Junior Researchers (F/M). Head on over to the Vacancies page or contact Dr. Aggelos Liapis for more information.

On 28 July 2008 , Pieter De Leenheer will give a keynote at the International Workshop on Engineering Semantic Agent Systems (ESAS 2008) co-located with COMPSAC 2008 (Turku, Finland).

Prof. Robert Meersman from STAR Lab has presented a keynote talk at IEEE DEST 2008 (Second IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies), Phitsanulok, Thailand. This conference has a special theme on "Selforganized Collaborative Platform" this year.

Keynote title

Ontologies for Web Information Systems and Open Applications.

On 16th April, 2008, Dr. Tanguy Coenen from VUB STARLab gave a speech "semantic challenges in social software" at IFIP workshop on “Emergent semantics in a social context”.

He has discussed social software and the way it is evolving, some semantic challenges which already exist or which could become relevant in the future, the aspects of the application of social software in organisations and provided a broad overview to incite further discussion during the workshop.

Stijn Christiaens gave a talk at CENTRAL on 21 April, 2008. Below is the main discussion.

A major problem in todays information society is the large amount of available content. It can be a tedious task to find the information one seeks. The main reason for this problem is that the data is highly instructured or semi-structured and that meaning is only visible to human agents. A lot of research is trying to solve this problem in order to enable the Semantic web, and beyond that, the Pragmatic Web.