Best Paper Award at ISWC 2008

Manchester Computer Scientists have won (again) the ISWC Best Paper Award.

The paper entitled:

Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL

Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia, and Uli Sattler won the ISWC Best Paper Award 2008, after Boris Motik won the same award in 2006 whilst being in Manchester.

Justifications are a means to explain entailments from OWL ontologies, and are indispensable to engineering ontologies. In this paper, the authors introduce so-called laconic and precise Jjustifications, which are justifications to support users in understanding and repairing ontologies that contain no superfluous parts. The authors not only present the logical foundation for these justifications, but also show in experiments that they can indeed be computed for realistic ontologies. Interestingly, they observe two novel phenomena that are extremely useful for understanding and repairing ontologies, called internal and external masking.

You can learn more on activities related to OWL in Manchester, and will soon be able to see Matthew's presentation of this paper as a videolecture.