On Monday July 7th begins in Cercedilla, Madrid, the Sixth Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW08), organized by the Ontology Engineering Group, Computer Science School at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (School of Computing) and directed by John Domingue (The Open University) and Professor of the Computer Science School Asunción Gómez Pérez.

The summer school will develop its activities throughout the week and involves speakers Mark Greaves (Vulcan, Inc., U.S.), Guus Schreiber (VU University Amsterdam, NL), Enrico Motta (The Open University, UK) Natasha Noy (Stanford, U.S.) and Chris Welty (IBM Watson Research Center, U.S.).

The tutors of the summer school are Sean Bechhofer (University of Manchester, UK) Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield, UK), Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France), Aldo Gangemi (National Research Council, Italy) and directors John Domingue and Asuncion Gomez-Perez (Director of the Ontology Engineering Group of FIUPM).

Opportunity for graduate

This summer school is an opportunity for graduate students, who may acquire the knowledge and skills that are necessary for perfect development of ontologies and semantic web applications. To ensure seamless integration, participation is limited to 50 students.

The summer school is designed as an experience that combines theory with practice, developed through workshops and mini pilot projects. These mini-projects are developed as a team to promote cooperation with other participants and will serve to reinforce knowledge and skills acquired in lectures and workshops.

Summer school is also a great opportunity to exchange knowledge and experiences with experts, as all participants will make a presentation of their research. The participants are graduate students in relevant disciplines with some ontology knowledge or computer engineering knowledge.

This series of summer schools was sponsored initially by the European Thematic Network OntoWeb and subsequently by the European Network of Excellence KnowledgeWeb. In its sixth edition is sponsored by a number of European projects, including LUISA, NEON, SUPER and X-MEDIA and by STI International.