1st SEALS Tutorial – Semantic evaluation at large scale

Semantic Web technologies have become a well-established area of computer science research. With the increasing number of technologies being developed, the problem of how to compare and evaluate the various approaches gains more and more importance. Such evaluation is critical not only for future scientific progress, but also for the industrial adoption of the developed technologies. A still open challenge in this area is the lack of standard benchmarks and evaluation resources that can be easily reused by the community.

The objective of the SEALS (Semantic Evaluation at Large Scale) European project is to create a lasting reference infrastructure for semantic technology evaluation (the SEALS Platform) and enable the continuous benchmarking of semantic technologies at a large scale via public evaluation campaigns. In October 2010 the SEALS project completed its first phase where different evaluation services for semantic technologies were implemented in the SEALS Platform and were used to evaluate several tools in the first set of SEALS Evaluation Campaigns.

Automated evaluation of semantic technologies is a challenge in the Semantic Web area. SEALS concentrates on providing an infrastructure for the evaluation of five key areas of semantic technologies: ontology engineering tools, storage and reasoning systems, matching tools, semantic search tools, and semantic web service tools. The SEALS Platform provides an integrated way for evaluating these technologies through a set of evaluation services and test suites. This kind of infrastructure is crucial for researches, developers and industrial adopters of these technologies.

This tutorial aims at presenting the SEALS Platform and is targeted at researchers and practitioners interested in learning how to use this platform for evaluating their semantic technologies.

Detailed information can be found at 1st SEALS Tutorial.