Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In July, the European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web will host its sixth annual session. Last week, registration opened for those who would like to be among the 50 post-graduate students that participate annually -- and who likely will become part of a cohort of the next generation of researchers who will push work in the area forward.

Sponsored by a number of European projects, including LUISA, NEON, SUPER and X-MEDIA, and also by STI International, tutors and keynote speakers include a veritable who's who of semantic web thought leaders. Tutors include John Domingue of The Open University in the UK, who is spearheading the organizing committee, and Sean Bechhofer of the U.K.'s University of Manchester, and among the keynote speakers are Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Jim Hendler, and Mark Greaves of Vulcan Inc.

The week-long session takes place in Cercedilla, a small village in the mountains near Madrid. The approach is based on tutorials and hands-on practical workshops around developing Ontologies and Semantic Web applications, all linked to a mini-project that results from cooperation among the participants. Bechhofer, who is now involved with the project for the fourth year, says the kind of collaboration and team-work that is fostered in the intimate and intense program matters to the future of semantic technology.

"We see the groups that got together in projects there, and as you go on to subsequent meetings, conferences or workshops, you see those students are still together, interacting, form collaborations, cooperating, visiting, and helping to build and weave together a community, which is very important," he says. "It's really a useful and nice thing to see the fact that the summer school helps to forge those links."

Publications and workshop papers have come out of collaborations that originally started at the summer school, he notes. This year, Bechhofer expects to give a theoretical session on looking at the rationale behind OWL, including its importance to the development of the semantic web and is technical details (ontology matching, ontological engineering, conceptual design, and so on), which will be followed up with a practical session to explore those ideas looking at some sample models.

Other instructors have agreed about how the program is helping develop the next generation of PhD candidates.

"During the last days the students have to work in teams on mini-projects to come up with interesting applications, bringing up research questions and to get a glimpse on how to work in international collaborative teams," wrote Stephen Baumann of the Competence Center Computational Culture, German Research Center for AI, in a blog posting a couple of years ago. He presented at the fourth version of the summer school on the topic "Towards a Social Web?!" He called the event a "must" for those PhD students in the early stages of their work, as well as their supervisors.