SEALS sponsored and presented at the SemSearch2010 workshop this past April.

The SemSearch2010 workshop was co-located at the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), held in Raleigh, NC, USA. This prestigious workshop (acceptance rate of 55%) brought together the leading researchers active in the field of IR and semantic search. The venue provided an ideal place to introduce the SEALS initiative in general and specifically the SEALS formal evaluation of semantic search technologies. The SEALS semantic search team presented a full paper which described the methodology being employed and details of the data and infrastructure being used. Furthermore, SEALS sponsored the best paper award for the workshop which was awarded to Jose Perez-Aguera (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) et al for their work on using BM25F for Semantic Search.

The SEALS paper and associated presentation slides are available now; the video of the presentation is available from videolectures.net.

The SEALS project is pleased to announce that the Project Management Board (PMB) has agreed that the SEALS platform will be released under the Apache 2.0 software license. Terms  and conditions of the Apache 2.0 license can be found at:

The SEALS platform is "an independent, open, scalable, extensible and sustainable infrastructure that will allow the remote evaluation of semantic technologies by providing an integrated set of evaluation services and test suites". For more information about the platform, see the earlier news item.  

The Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) organizes evaluation campaigns aiming at evaluating ontology matching technologies. The latest campaign took place at the ISWC Ontology matching workshop held at Fairfax (VA US), near Washington DC on Sunday October 25, 2009.

The OAEI-2009 prliminary results are now available here. OAEI 2009 had 16 participants who participated in 53 tests. A synthetic result paper is available here

We look forward to the organization of the 2010 edition of the OAEI with the support of SEALS, meaning also that benchmarking tests may be performed on the SEALS platform and results will be published over the SEALS portal. For first information about the next OAEI campaign and priviledged access to benchmark tests and results when they are ready, you are encouraged to join the SEALS Community.

We are now starting to distribute the SEALS press release to different media.

Up to now, it has been published in the News section of the Computer
Science Faculty of UPM:
http://www.fi.upm.es/?id=tablon&acciongt=consulta1&idet=356
in the AlphaGalileo research news portal:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=63102&CultureCode=en
in the Communications of the ACM news:
http://cacm.acm.org/news/52853-new-step-for-the-future-web/fulltext
and, related to this, in the ACM TechNews newsletter:
http://technews.acm.org/archives.cfm?fo=2009-11-nov/nov-23-2009.html

Feel free to make any comment about the press release using the "Add new comment" option below (only for logged in members) and to distribute it
in the places that you know (or suggest to us to distribute it somewhere).

The SEALS consortium will organise two evaluation campaigns. The first will be held in summer 2010 and the second is expected to be conducted in late 2011 / early 2012. The integrated processing of the different evaluation campaign results will allow working out semantic technology roadmaps that will support selecting groups of compatible tools for developing Semantic Web applications.

The formal methodology for the 1^st SEALS Evaluation Campaign is currently being finalised (due November 2009) and will provide information for potential participants regarding the timescales involved, the terms of participation and the procedures involved. The below diagram reflects our current planning for the 1st evaluation campaign in 2010.

We encourage parties from across the community (both tool developers and tool consumers) to join the SEALS community (submit the expression of interest form at http://www.seals-project.eu/join-the-community  and be the first to get an invitation); you will receive more information about the SEALS project and be kept up-to-date with the latest developments, achievements and details of the campaigns.

At the core of the SEALS project is the development and maintenance of the SEALS Platform. The SEALS Platform will be an independent, open, scalable, extensible and sustainable infrastructure that will allow the remote evaluation of semantic technologies by providing an integrated set of evaluation services and test suites.

Furthermore, the platform will provide easy and free access to evaluation services and to the results of the evaluations performed, allowing researchers and users to effectively compare available technologies, helping them to select appropriate technologies and advancing the state of the art through continuous evaluation. Our long-term goal is that the SEALS Platform be actively used and managed by the semantic community well beyond the lifetime of the SEALS project.

The SEALS consortium is in the final stages of designing the SEALS Platform Architecture prototype with the prototype’s final design scheduled to be ready for November 2009. The prototype platform will subsequently be implemented by the end of Q2 2010 (with beta releases expected before this) ahead of the 1^st Evaluation Campaign in summer 2010. Feedback from the first evaluation campaign will be incorporated into the specification and design of the final platform architecture.

The SEALS Platform consists of a number of different technologies and services: the SEALS Service Manager, the Runtime Evaluation Service and a range of repository services. These latter services include the Test Data Repository Service, the Tools Repository Service, the Results Repository Service, and the Evaluation Descriptions Repository Service.

The SEALS Platform targets the formal, automated evaluation of ontology engineering tools, storage and reasoning systems, ontology matching tools, semantic search tools and semantic web service tools. As such, the SEALS consortium will provide a range of ready-to-use evaluation scenarios and test data sets to satisfy the requirements for the effective evaluation of each of these tool types. This data will be stored within the platform with certain subsets being made available to the SEALS community for development purposes.

The main means of interacting with the SEALS Platform will be via the SEALS Portal. Tool developers will be able to upload their tool to the platform (which will be stored in the Tools Repository), request that it be evaluated in one or more tool categories and be able to retrieve the benchmarking results. The SEALS Portal will also provide information targeted at tool consumers ranging from individual tool results to analyses and technology roadmaps.