I’ll be in class during this talk, but I had a chance to have dinner and chat with Dr. Deborah McGuinness about her visit here and her talk (here from Cristin Paul’s announcement). If you get to go send me a link to your notes or add as comments here please:

What: Emerging Semantic Web Trends: Transparent and Trustworthy Applications and Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration

Who: Deborah L. McGuinness, Ph.D., Acting Director, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University
When: Tuesday, January 16 from 12:00 noon to 1:15 pm
Where: John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University (location and parking information)

Dr. Deborah L. McGuinness, international expert on Semantic Web technology, ontologies and knowledge representation,
and co-editor of the World-Wide Web Consortium’s Web Ontology Language (OWL) specification, will present this invited discussion seminar as part of the Duke Information Science & Information Studies (ISIS) “Tech Tuesdays” series.

Lunch will be provided.

The talk is of special interest to informaticians, computer scientists, and all interested in scientific data integration, metadata and the World Wide Web.
Colleagues from Duke, NCSU, NCCU, UNC and RTP organizations are all cordially invited! Please share this announcement.

Dr. McGuinness will be in the Triangle area on Monday and Tuesday (1/15-1/16). If you or your research group would like to meet with her to discuss projects or research ideas, she has time-slots available. Contact Dr. John Madden to arrange a time and location.

*Abstract*

As web applications proliferate, more users are faced with decisions when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information, users need to understand how it was obtained and what assumptions it depended upon. Web-based applications may use question-answering methods that are heuristic or incomplete, and they may depend on data whose origin and date are unknown. Therefore, it becomes ever more important to return answers augmented with meta-information about how the conclusions were obtained.

In this talk, Deborah McGuinness will describe an approach that can improve trust in answers generated from web applications by making the answer process more transparent. The added information provides users (humans or
agents) with answers to questions of trust, reliability, recency, and applicability.

The talk will include descriptions of a few representative applications  using cognitive assistants and intelligence analyst tools. The talk will also briefly highlight work on semantically-enabled, integrated access to scientific data. Examples will be taken from Deborah’s work on the NSF-funded Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory and the NASA-funded Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration projects.