Category: Conferences

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Semantic Web Group at ISWC 2023

The Semantic Web group contributed to the 18th International Semantic Web Conference – ISWC 2023 in several ways.

Olaf Hartig is co-author of the paper “FedShop: A Benchmark for Testing the Scalability of SPARQL Federation Engines” presented in the resource track.

Huanyu Li, Olaf Hartig and Patrick Lambrix, together with Rickard Armiento presented a demonstration of the system “OBG-gen: Ontology-Based GraphQL Server Generation for Data Integration”.

Patrick Lambrix and Huanyu Li, together with Bo Fu, Susana Nunes and Catia Pesquita organized the  8th International Workshop on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies, Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs – VOILA 2023. Proceedings are available at CEUR.

Huanyu Li co-organized the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2023. Mina Abd Nikooie Pour, Ying Li, Huanyu Li and Patrick Lambrix co-organized two tracks in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (the Anatomy track and the Interactive track).

Eva Blomqvist together with Raghava Mutharaju, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Pramit Bhattacharyya, Luigi Asprino, and Gunjan Singh organized the 14th Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns – WOP 2023. At WOP, Eva Blomqvist presented the paper “Cross-domain Modelling – A Network of Core Ontologies for the Circular Economy” by Eva Blomqvist, Huanyu Li, Robin Keskisärkkä, Mikael Lindecrantz, Mina Abd Nikooie Pour, Ying Li and Patrick Lambrix.

Olaf Hartig was invited speaker at QuWeDa 2023, the 7th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs. His talk was titled “GraphQL and RDF: Quo Vadis?”

At the 18th International Workshop on Ontology Matching, Patrick Lambrix presented the paper “Repairing Ontology Networks using Weakening and Completion” by Ying Li and Patrick Lambrix. Huanyu Li presented results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative. Further, Huanyu Li was co-author of the paper “A simple standard for ontological mappings 2023: updates of data model and outlook”.

Mikael Lindecrantz presented part of his thesis work “Decentralized Digital Twins of Circular Value Networks” at the Doctoral Consortium.

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A very successful ISWC 2017 for LiU SemWeb

Many of us attended the 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) which was held on October 21-25 in the beautiful city of Vienna, and it turned out to be a very successful conference for us! Our contributions to the conference were in the co-organization of workshops (WOP 2017 and VOILA 2017), a tutorial (“Semantic Data Management in Practice”) and two tracks of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, as well as two research papers (“Alignment Cubes: Towards Interactive Visual Exploration and Evaluation of Multiple Ontology Alignments” and “A Formal Framework for Comparing Linked Data Fragments”), a demo, and a poster. In addition to successfully running our aforementioned sub-events and presenting our research, we won a couple of awards:

  • Valentina won a best reviewer award for the main research track,
  • Olaf won the peoples’ choice best poster award, and
  • together with Ian Letter and Jorge Pérez (both from the Universidad de Chile), Olaf also won the best research paper award! You may want to read a brief description of this work.

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Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns held at ISWC 2017

On Saturday October 21st the 8th WOP workshop was run during ISWC2017 in Vienna, Austria. Eva Blomqvist has been the general chair of this workshop instance, and co-organisers included Oscar Corcho (UPM), David Carral (TU Dresden), Rinke Hoekstra (Elsevier) and Matthew Horridge (Stanford). The workshop program and other information can be found on the WOP2017 page.

Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University, US) kicked off the workshop with a very interesting keynote on next generation ontology engineering, listing a number of open problems and practical showstoppers towards better utilisation of ODPs in ontology engineering. Then we heard a number of exciting talks presenting the latest research around ODPs, and a number of actual ODPs were also described. The workshop concluded with a discussion session, conducted in three groups, focusing on different problems bought forth by the participants. The groups talked about meta-languages to describe ODPs and ODP usage, relations between ODPs, and the relation between ontologies and thesauri. Notes are on the WOP page linked above.

An interesting thing to note is that ODP research is getting broader, with two main tracks; one considering the classical view of ODPs as design patterns for ontologies, and the second one more focusing on ODPs as templates or macros for generating OWL from a specification. A lot of discussions at the workshop centered around how to use both these views together to allow users to benefit from both of them. Interest in ODPs is also not only an academic thing, in the audience there were several industry representatives from around the world. Overall, the workshop attracted a quite large audience, counting around 45 people during the main sessions. In the evening almost half of the attendants met again, for a social dinner at a local restaurant.

Anyone who is interested in updates on ODP research and future events is encouraged to join the ODP mailing list (a google group).

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Eva Blomqvist invited speaker at the ESSENCE final conference

ESSENCE is an EU-funded Marie Curie network, ending in October 2017. As a final event the network arranged the International Conference on Computational Approaches to Diversity in Interaction and Meaning, in San Servolo, Venice, Italy, from 6-9 October 2017. Eva Blomqvist was one of the invited speakers in this conference, talking about managing diversity of ontologies on the Semantic Web by means of Ontology Design Patterns (ODP). An ODP is not only an aid for constructing ontologies, but also a means of identifying commonalities in ontologies, i.e., based on the way they model various aspects. So at a certain level of abstraction ODPs can constitute a shared level of understanding between ontologies using those same ODPs.

The slides of Eva’s talk are available here.

A tweet containing some nice pictures from the talk.

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LiU Semantic Web group at ESWC2017

This week a couple of us have been at ESWC2017 in Portoroz, Slovenia. Eva Blomqvist was the general chair of the conference this year, hence, this was the culmination of a whole year of hard work for her. Olaf Hartig is the proceedings chair (proceedings part 1 and 2). He could not attend the conference this year, but has done great job with the Springer proceedings, and the upcoming post-proceedings volume with poster and demo papers among other things. In addition to this, Karl Hammar, was one of the organisers of the Modular Ontology Modeling with Ontology Design Patterns tutorial, together with Pascal Hitzler, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Agnieszka Lawrynowicz and Monika Solanki. In particular, Karl ran the hands-on session with his tool for ODP-based modelling in WebProtégé (called XDP). Finally, Henrik Eriksson, presented our EU-funded project VALCRI in the project networking session, and in the poster session.

The overall conference was interesting as always, and included a lot of networking opportunities, as well as interesting work to take a closer look at. A quick summary of some of the major events:

Crosbie

Kevin Crosbie, from Ravenpack, the first keynote speaker talking about how to model events in order to use them for predicting financial markets. Very interesting talk, describing how Ravenpack work with their data products and apply technologies very similar to Semantic Web, although technically not using the W3C standards, such as RDF.

Panel

At the end of the first day, Aldo Gangemi chaired a panel about the future of academic publishing, discussing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. It is clear that something needs to be done about both the reviewing situation in our field, the open access issue, and we want more focus on “eating our own dog food”. The discussions were also related to the paper that later won the best student paper award, on Linked Data Notifications.

Sheridan

Second keynote speaker, John Sheridan, from the National Archives in the UK, described how the National Archives heavily rely on Semantic Web technologies and standards to solve their archiving tasks. However there are also challenges of course, which can hopefully be solved by working together: academia and society at large. Particularly interesting for us at LiU to hear that the National Archives is in great need of a better solution for modelling trust and uncertainty in their data, which could be a potential use case for the recent research results on RDF* and SPARQL* by Olaf Hartig.

Dinner

Nice conference dinner at the beach, and a chance for the general chair to thank all the people in the organising committee.

Poster

Poster session with lots of interesting interactions and discussion, here with Diego Reforgirato, who later won both the best poster and best demo awards.

Unfortunately, we did not take any picture of the last keynote, Lora Aroyo, who gave a very interesting keynote on the last day. She started with an overview of the evolution of the field, pointing out that studying and using people to acquire knowledge has always been a central part of our research. However, by over simplifying, and trying to fit every answer into yes/no categories, we can introduce wrong conclusions. She means that we need to be aware of ambiguity and diversity in opinions, that there is usually not one true answer, and instead turn that to our advantage. Lora showed a vector-based model to represent diversity in opinions.

Finally, Aldo Gangemi will be the next general chair of ESWC in 2018, and he made a series of interesting promises for the next year, among others: double-open review process, improvements in the online pre-prints of the proceedings and the dataset, a resources track and an industry session á la ISWC, and better music in the social events. We all wish him the best of luck with the next conference, and we are excited to see all the innovations next year!