Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the Grid and Digital Libraries Workshop Report from E-Science Institute, Edinburgh 16 May 2003 Ali Shiri Introduction Organised jointly by UKOLN and the UK e-science Core Programme, this workshop brought together GRID and digital library implementers on 16 May 2003 in Edinburgh, Scotland to consider approaches to developing, expressing and sharing schemas and ontologies [1]. The main themes of the workshop were as follows: • Developing core vocabularies. • Mapping between vocabularies. • Sharing languages and models for declaring schemas. • Mandating schemas for base-line interoperability. • Establishing a distributed network of schema registries. The workshop comprised of five presentations [2] and three breakout sessions. There were around 50 participants representing a wide range of communities and disciplines. They included those mainly from computing science departments, the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), the e-science Institute in Edinburgh, Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) as well as a number of librarians and information scientists from other organisations. The first presentation entitled "Building a semantic infrastructure" by David de Roure from the University of Southampton discussed issues surrounding "the semantic GRID" or what he defined as "an underlying computer infrastructure which enables scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in a more effective manner". The focus of the semantic GRID is on ontologies and metadata-based middleware that underpin resource sharing and interoperability. One of the examples of the GRID computing is a project called "Hyphen" (www.hyphen.info), a semantic Web project at Southampton University which provides ontology-based access to home pages, departmental Web sites and other repositories of information of the Computer Science departments throughout the UK. "Why ontologies?" was the title of the presentation by Jeremy Rogers from the University of Manchester whose particular focus was on medical terminologies and ontologies. The presentation provided an historical overview of medical terminologies and discussed issues relating to the breadth and depth of each terminology. Some of the terminologies referred to in the presentation were MeSH, UMLS and SNOMED. The presentation also shed light on problems of using medical thesauri and ontologies from the user point of view and indicated the challenges involved in ontology mapping and visual representation of concepts. The major issues which were raised at the end of the presentation were as follows: there are problems of scaling in cross mapping lists, browsing lists and translating lists, formal ontologies with formal logic