WORKSHOP ON INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMICAL DATA

by Professor Albert Zijlstra, University of Manchester

Telescopes produce huge amounts of data. The Vera Rubin Observatory, for instance, can image the entire sky visible from Chile twice a week, and produce 15 TB of imaging data per night. Some data sets consists of catalogues: as an example, the GAIA mission of the European Space Agency has produced a catalogue of over 1 billion stars, and has a (compressed) size of 1 TB. Data in astronomy is predominantly public, with a common data format. Much is kept in dedicated data centres. This workshop will introduce some of the tools that are used to access these data.

WORKSHOP ON THE FUNDAMENTAL OF SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY

by Dr. Saidah Saad, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

This workshop will introduces participant on the basis of semantic concepts, semantic technology where it provide easier ways to find, share, reuse and combine information. Semantic Technologies define and link data on the Web by using the internet language to enrich the knowledge, self-describing interrelated of data in a machine-readable form. Participant are exposed to the various internet languages needed in semantic technology such as RDF, RDFs, OWL, SPARQL, SWRL and SQWRL.

RDF is the format Semantic Technology uses to store data on the Semantic Web or in a semantic graph database. SPARQL is the semantic query language specifically designed to query data across various systems and databases, and to retrieve and process data stored in RDF format. OWL is the computational logic-based language that is designed to show the data schema and that represents rich and complex knowledge about hierarchies of things and the relations between them. It is complementary to RDF and allows for formalizing a data schema/ontology in a given domain, separately from the data.

The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is a proposed language for the Semantic Web that can be used to express rules as well as logic, combining OWL DL or OWL Lite with a subset of the Rule Markup Language. Where as the Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL) is SWRL-based query language that provides SQL-like operators for extracting information from OWL ontologies. An ontology are part of the W3C standards stack for the Semantic Web where it is a formal description of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships that hold between them. To enable such a description, we need to formally specify components such as individuals (instances of objects), classes, attributes and relations as well as restrictions, rules and axioms. As a result, ontologies do not only introduce a sharable and reusable knowledge representation but can also add new knowledge about the domain. Participant are also given practical use of open source software, Protégé to develop web semantic application for specific domain.