GrowingPains: International Conference on Conceptual Structures

Summer so far has not been a holiday for me, it being a very heavy-duty conference season for me this year. However, I have finally made it back home , dealt with the highest of the piles, and now urgently need to do some blog-busting!

The third week of July, I was in Kassel, Germany, attending ICCS 2005, the 13th International Conference on Conceptual Structures. Most of downtown Kassel was destroyed during WWII, but it is famous for two unique things: Europe's largest hillside park surrounding the castle of Wilhemshöhe, with its awe-inspiring waterfalls, fountains, and other "water arts", and Documenta, the 5-yearly, largest contemporary arts exhibition in the world!

I have been going to ICCS almost every year since 1997. It's a fascinating conference, attended by an odd mix of mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists, and people from many other walks of scientific life. It's a "meta-conference", in that participants look beyond the particular formalisms they are familiar with, trying to build bridges between different knowledge representation and analysis approaches. Besides, it's a great group of intelligent, friendly, and caring people, as is proved by this your-blog-author-in-friendly-social-interaction shot :-)

Over the years, my research increasingly got focused on virtual communities. This is nicely reflected in my ICCS publications. In 1997, my key interest was still on the individual user in "networks" ("Applying Conceptual Graph Theory to the User-Driven Specification of Network Information Systems"). However, over time, community aspects got the upper hand. For example, at ICCS 2004, I had a paper on "Improving the Testbed Development Process in Collaboratories", in which I looked at how collaborative communities can improve their socio-technical systems in an evolutionary process of design hypothesis testing over time.

This year, based on this progression in my work, I was asked to be an invited speaker, which I consider to be a great honor, especially coming from those long-time colleagues and friends whose work and philosophy I respect highly. I decided to talk about the Pragmatic Web, the next step in the evolution of the Web, in which virtual communities play an essential role. In my next post, I will explain my views on "Patterns for the Pragmatic Web".

March 2012