Grand Challenge

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OCAS can be summarized in a simple sentence, “Ontologies and Semantic Web technology come of age, how is the Semantic Web changing our experience of the Web?” Moving beyond theoretical frameworks and heading towards a significant impact in end user experience is at the core of OCAS. The overall objective of the challenge is to illustrate how ontologies and SW technologies are delivering novel user experiences.



First place: US$ 2000

Second place: US$ 1000

Three third prizes of $500 each


Selected projects will be funded through implementation by Protech Solutions Inc. 
Projects are to focus on innovative uses of HPC and data mining in semantic technologies for HealthCare, Medical Informatics and Computer Security. Projects with high relevance to social networking, low-tech environments, and third-world countries are encouraged. 

Those participating in the challenge should provide a three-page manuscript describing their software; from the manuscript it should be clear for judges:

  • Software availability: judges and general public should be able to access the software. In most cases this means that the software, ontologies and/or infrastructure is freely accessible -free software is not compulsory.
  • Semantic Web technology: how is this application making use of semantic web technology? How is this application making use of existing infrastructure? Data sources being used, etc.
  • How is it delivering new layers of functionality based on semantic data sources (linked data, RDF stores, ontologies, etc).
  • How is it delivering an intelligent interconnected experience to the end user?
  • What is the added value?
  • How is the Interconnectedness of semantic data sets being delivered to the end user? 
  • How are intelligence and interconnectivity being supported by the software or infrastructure?
  • Does the software or infrastructure represent a fundamental change for the domain rather than just an incremental improvement or just one of
    many added new features?

We would like to have applications from all domains. The GC is not limited to web based applications, mobile platforms for devices like iPAD, iphone, Galaxy, XOOM, HTC, etc are also encouraged.  Authors submitting to other Challenges, workshops and conferences are welcome to also submit their work to the OCAS challenge.

For those who require high performance computing facilities our sponsor,, will make them available free of charge. 

Submission should be via Easychair

 All papers submitted for the OCAS Challenge should be formatted according to the LNCS format.



- Paper submission deadline: August 15
- Notification of acceptance or rejection: September 5
- Camera ready version due: September 16


Judging the Challenge:


Pascal Hitzler, Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

Alexander Garcia, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, USA.

Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, UK

Michel Dumontier,  Carleton University, Canada