NIST Third Interoperability Week April 28-May 2

For manufacturing engineers and linguists "interoperability" and "ontology" go together like horse and carriage—"you can't have one without the other." The matchup will be evident at the Third Annual Interoperability Week hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from April 28 to May 2 in Gaithersburg, Md. Researchers in the two fields will respectively tackle emerging standards for transmitting data from machines that use different software programs (interoperability) and formal rules for understanding the meaning of terms in data and their relationships (ontology).

An Ontology Summit (April 28-29) opens the workshop week with a discussion of issues surrounding repositories of ontologies, such as management, quality assurance and reuse.

The spring meeting of the Open Applications Group Inc. (OAGi, April 29-30) focuses on the use of XML-based standards to promote business process interoperability. As part of the meeting, NIST researchers will present their work to perfect validation tools for OAGi standards, including an automatic validator for OAGi naming and design rules.

The Collaborative Expedition workshop (April 30) will explore identity management principally in the fields of homeland security and cyber infrastructure.

At a Sensor Standards Harmonization Working Group (SSHWG, April 1) experts from the government, industry and academia will discuss opportunities to harmonize sensor-related standards such as the IEEE Smart Sensor Standard (IEEE 1451) and sensor-related standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Finally, a 2D and 3D Content Representation, Analysis and Retrieval workshop (May 1-2) will allow researchers to present their advances in image processing, image analysis, shape analysis, indexing, data mining, metadata, ontology, interoperability tools, bench markers and evaluation methodologies.

Additional information on Interoperability Week can be found at this Web site.