National ICT Center Opening in Canberra

NICTA will be opening their new national ICT center building in Canberra next month, with a free seminar on "Semantic Technologies for Business and Government", 13 November . Unfortunately NICTA prepared the invitation as a PDF file which is 9 times larger than it need be, so here is text version of the details:

Semantic Technologies for Business and Government
A half-day seminar in Canberra co-ordinated by NICTA’s e-Government Project

Abstract

We live in an age of information overload, surrounded by masses of digital data, but lacking the tools to process it based on its meaning or semantics. Consequently, a lot of human time and effort is spent manually transforming and processing data when porting it from one application or data store to another, or when aggregating it into a form suited for analysis and execution. Semantic Technologies represent a new wave in computing which aims to make the meaning of data and services explicit and machine processible for improved interoperability, searching and querying.
This seminar will focus on the core concepts and issues of semantic technologies, covering these topics:

• Overview of semantic technologies — Semantic Web, Web2.0, Ontologies, Metamodels and Metadata creation, Modelling Languages, OWL, Knowledge Sharing and Utilization;
• Overview of current tools, languages, and notations;
• Applicability to government services, processes, and infrastructure;
• Case studies of the use of semantic technologies in government;
• Survey of industry opinion in Australia on the future of semantic technologies.

Rather than comparing vendor technologies or detailing specific languages and notations, the seminar will focus on presenting the core technical ideas and approach of semantic technologies, providing attendees with a firm basis for further investigation and evaluation.

Intended Audience

This seminar is designed for senior technical staff and business managers in government, involved in business transformation, digital preservation and record keeping, knowledge management, enterprise planning and enterprise architecting,
inter-agency interoperability, and organisational process improvement. It will also be of interest to representatives of the ICT industry involved in enabling these activities.

Format of the Seminar

9:00 Registration
9:15–10:30 Session 1:
Overview of Semantic Technologies (Anne Cregan and Paul Brebner, NICTA).
Government case study (Don Bartley, ABS).
10:30–11:00 Morning Tea
11:00–12:00 Session 2:
Case Study 2 Industry Survey — Towards the Semantic Web: Standards and Interoperability across Document Management and Publishing Supply Chains (Anni Rowland-Campbell, Fuji-Xerox and RMIT).
12:00–12:30 Panel Session.
Includes the above presenters plus representatives from AGIMO.
12:30–13:30 Light Lunch and Networking

Bookings for this free event are essential

Please RSVP by no later than 6 November, 2007:
Phone: (08) 8302 3928
Fax: (08) 8302 3115
Email: industryeducation@nicta.com.au

Seminar Room NICTA Building 7 London Circuit Canberra ACT

Date: Tuesday, 13th November 2007 9:00am--1:30pm

From: Semantic Technologies for Business and Government, NICTA, 2007

ps: While NICTA's PDF files are too big, they are not as bad as National Archives of Australia invitations. The invitation I was emailed for their National Speaker's Corner, was 5.2 Mbytes, which is 200 times larger than it need be. By doing so NAA is wasting public money and contributing to the greenhouse effect.

To see how to do elelctronic documents, and therefore government, more efficiently, there are still some places on my course available.