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Mark Musen (Stanford) is the keynote speaker. He described some of the history of the Protege platform. I found it interesting that it was originally written in LISP, but didn't take off until they transitioned to being Java-based. He has been speaking for the last hour or so about how to take ontology engineering to the next level: industrial-strength ontology repositories and management tools, akin to the type of online tools that are available to the literary (as in scientific journals) and software engineering tools.

There is a lot of excitement around the explosion of interest in ontologies that is taking place all over the world in the last year. Ontologies are primarily still a cottage industry, where one or a few artisans craft an ontology. It is clear that process models for large-group collaboration by workgroups are very necessary (and I add, in the form of usable web-based tools). Mark has overall been using the craft --> industrial age historical shift to describe the evolution of ontology tools. He mentioned large-scale successful ontologies that have not been documented very well (such as Cyc and Gene Ontology Consortium). There is a widely-acknowledged need for killer-apps that highlight the usefulness of ontologies or incorporate them in a transparent, yet vital role.

Alan Rector (U. of Manchester) from Manchester just made a wonderful comment challenging Mark's picture of ontology review as literary criticism. He drew attention to the open-source world and modern software engineering world as providing a better model for ontology technologists to follow in order to get to "industrial", in contrast to the way that scientific journals are reviewed. He said something along the lines of not caring too much about individual opinions regarding the overall ontology; more interested in pointing out specific areas of improvements or corrections. I was moved to clap, but I understand there is a quite a dichotomy in the how ontologies are used. There are ontologies which are essentially just capturing information (almost like super-detailed textbooks) and that are others that are primarily written to drive software.

My confidence that deep integration might be a killer-app is growing.