[sem-grd] end of year message

[David De Roure]

All

I just wanted to thank everyone for their interest, work and 
contributions over the last year...

The Dagstuhl seminar was a key event, where those at the intersection 
of Semantic Web and Grid brought together new people from both fields 
for the first time and in a unique setting - it demonstrated the value 
of being locked in a castle for a few days in terms of building a
community!  Thanks to York Sure for helping to organise things and 
getting the proceedings online.  The key moment for me was dinner with 
Jim Myers where we drew embryonic VO and WSRF ontologies on the 
tablecloth, called Dave Snelling over and by the end of the evening
everyone was building the ontology on the whiteboard and in their
favourite editors - a new form of party game... :)

As well as organising Dagstuhl with York and Carl, Carole has continued 
to inform and entertain with some excellent keynotes this year including
the epic "Putting Semantics into e-Science and the Grid" in Melbourne
recently (I've just put this up on the Web site).  This must surely be 
the definitive Semantic Grid presentation at this time.

The GGF group has been looking to the future where we have loads of
services out there, particularly at what we can learn from agent-
oriented systems, and we're beginning to see these communities working
together.  Thanks to everyone who's helping build the bridges, including
Nick Jennings (with Ian and Carl), Jonathan Dale, Mike Wooldridge and
Yolanda Gil.  Thanks to all our GGF presenters and colleagues, and to
Marlon for helping run the group.

The key next event is the GGF16 Semantic Grid workshop in Athens in
February, which is based on position papers in order to keep a broad
scope and lots of participation - this is exciting as it's the first
workshop at a GGF in Europe and I'm sure there'll be lots to report and
lots to learn.  This workshop will help us map out future Semantic Grid 
activities.  

Meanwhile the first round UK e-Science pilot projects have finished,
including myGrid, CombeChem and Geodise which carried significant parts 
of the Semantic Grid agenda stemming from the original Semantic Grid
report for the e-Science programme back in 2001.  We appear to have
converted Jeremy Frey (CombeChem) from a chemist into a Semantic
DataGrid evangelist :)

The European "Grid House" projects are making excellent progress on the
semantic and knowledge fronts.  People are increasingly talking about
"Semantic Grid Services" and "Semantic OGSA", and it's exciting to see
OntoGrid producing a reference architecture - we'll be hearing more 
from Asun, Carole and others about this.  Also look out for a forthcoming
document from the "Next Generation Grids" experts group which talks about
Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities.

We've recently had the the first International Conference on Semantics,
Knowledge and Grid in Beijing.  Hai Zhuge put together this very
successful event and was also an excellent host for Geoffrey Fox, Raj
Buyya and myself.  Lots of activity there, and we look forward to the
SKG2006 event next year in Guilin.

We've had some really good discussions with W3C colleagues this year
and I'm looking forward to more developments there, with some grid
and Web events currently being planned - e.g. the WWW2006 conference 
in Edinburgh in May is a great opportunity in this regard.  It's very
clear that Life Sciences and Semantic Grid go well together, and given
the W3C interest in this domain we have some exciting times ahead.

Another rich area for the future is Semantic Grid in arts, humanities
and social sciences - there is increasing activity and lots of potential.
Thanks to Allison Clark for building these bridges and Reagan Moore for
his enthusiasm and support via WUNgrid.  I'm particularly excited by
discussions we've had with Stephen Downie at UIUC about semantic 
annotation and Semantic Grid in music information retrieval.

For me a really interesting development has been the increasing interest 
in Semantic Grid for collaboration (is that "Semantic Collaborative 
Grid" or "Collaborative Semantic Grid?") - this takes us into semantic
annotation, social tagging etc.  The social networks aspect, and the
symbiosis between social networks and VOs, came through strongly at the
recent NSF SNAC workshop at NCSA (thanks to Noshir Contractor for 
involving me), and Geoffrey Fox is planning a very interesting event in
May.

Incidentally, the special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics is coming
along nicely (thanks for your papers and reviews!) and we're having
discussions about a Semantic Grid book.

All for now.  I'm sure I've missed thanking some people, so thanks to
everyone else too, and best wishes to everyone for a semantically-assisted
2006!

-- Dave