The curtain comes down for the jointly organised conferences iPRES-2013 and DC-2013 currently underway in Lisbon, Portugal, with the conferences respectively fulfilling the expectations of their participants. In particular, the DC-2013 conference had paper presentations in parallel sessions, poster presentations, special presentations, doctoral symposium, and workshops (which were held in the first and also on the last day -with the latter mainly dedicated for DCMI working groups).The following presentations and sessions appealed much to me;

DC-2013 Conference highlights

'Linked Data Driven Dynamic Web-services for Bibliographic Multi-lingual Access to Diverse Japanesse Humanities Databases' by Biligsakhan Batjargal, Takeo Kuyama, Fuminori Kimura and Akira Maenda.

This presentation discussed Linked Data driven approaches in providing integrated multilingual access to diverse Japanese humanities databases by linking and re-using LOD resources dynamically. The proposed method was of interest, as it offered a method that dynamically generating links across databases using Linked Data when a user performs a search using keywords. The prototype retrieval system is based on LOD resources, personal names authority data, subject headings, and then links to other Linked Data resources. This is interesting as most information retrieval models use an ontology as a basis for linking resources.The paper is available here.

Special Session: Application Profiles as an Alternative to OWL Ontologies

This session was convened by Tom Baker and Karen Koyle and was available in 2 parts introduced with a main discussion by Tom on description set profiles and Ontologies expressed in OWL. The sessions discussed how the dual requirements of (data oriented) quality control and (Web oriented) interoperability are addressed using these two approaches. The discussion centered on achieving a common view on strength and weaknesses in Application Profiles as an alternative to OWL Ontologies,with an objective to identify next steps in the development of simple and practical conventions for Application Profiles. The summary of the discussion points can be read here. This discussion will be continued beyond DC 2013 at the RDF Validation workshop in MIT.

Keynote Address 3rd day: Horizon 2020 WP2014-2015 Research Infrastructures.

Carlos Morais Pires presented the 1st public presentation of the Horizon 2020 research data infrastructure focusing on the e-infrastructure.Horizon 2020 is the European Union's new framework programme for research and innovation, which when adopted by the EU parliament will open calls by the 1st of January 2014. Carlos presentation focused on the 'e-infrastructures' calls, which included the following themes 'e-infrastructure for open access', 'research data alliance' among other specific aspects of e-infrastructures.

More abstracts and presentations of DC-2013 and iPRESS-2013 can be viewed here.