ORE is 3!

The 2014 OWL Reasoner Evaluation Workshop and Competition (ORE2014) is the 3rd iteration and the second when there was a meaningful competition. So hurray! We had the workshop today (the competition will be held during DL 2014, to facilitate betting) and it was quite good. In particular, there was some super interesting work on new benchmarks (esp. for conjunctive query) and some reasoner-breaking ontologies with nice investigations. I’ll invite some of those folks to write a blog post about these.

The business meeting (see slides) focused on the critical question of whether

1. to move organisation into the OWLED community group
2. to merge ORE with OWLED (or tightly bind them).

Everyone is fine with using the community group (that’s, after all, secondary to the actual organisation structure we develop), but there was a marked preference for DL over OWLED as colocation partner (i.e., 14 would go happily to ORE with DL and only 2 happily and 9 (for 11 total) would go to ORE with OWLED). A lot depends on the participation and enthusiasm of OWLED folks.

The DL community very much enjoyed the live competition last year. It’ll be interesting to see how they react this year. Overall, I think convergence is a good thing and ORE more as “users meet developers” would be a great thing in OWLED.

I’d be remiss not to tip my hat to all those involved in the organisation. ORE is more work than the typical workshop because a competition is a very hard thing to get even marginally right! PC Chairs Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz and Samantha Bail continued their sterling work even though they couldn’t be there due to (resp) new child and new job. The Competition Organisers were (test infrastructure) Birte Glimm and Andreas Steigmiller and (test corpus) Nicolas Matentzoglu with some help from me. Our invaluable local organizers were Magdalena Ortiz and Mantas Šimkus while Thomas Krennwallner runs the Olympic Games overall.

As  last year, Konstantin Korovin, of the University of Manchester, donated his Royal Society (grant RG080491) funded cluster to run the competition.
The T-Shirts this year are so awesome I can barely contain myself. They feature a unicorn and random people wanted one because they “were so fun”. My legacy is complete!