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Olaf Hartig has received the 2019 10-Years Award of the Semantic Web Science Association. This annual award recognizes a research paper that has become the most influential work of all papers published ten years ago in the respective edition of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). The ISWC 2009 paper for which Olaf has now won the award started a line of research that focuses on evaluating database queries directly over interlinked data on the Web. In this context, Olaf’s paper pioneered the idea to integrate a traversal-based discovery of relevant data sources into the query execution process, and the paper introduced a first concrete approach to implement this idea in a query execution engine. Since its publication, the paper has spawned numerous other scientific work that proposed alternative approaches, established theoretical foundations of queries and query languages in the given context, and combined the ideas with other forms of query processing.

Robin Keskisärkkä, Eva Blomqvist, Leili Lind and Olaf Hartig won the Best Paper Award for their paper “RSP-QL*: Enabling Statement-Level Annotations in RDF Streams” at SEMANTiCS 2019.

Olaf Hartig won a grant from the Swedish Research Council to establish graph database research.

Our group contributed in several ways to ISWC 2019.
Olaf Hartig was PC co-chair and held, together with Ruben Taelman a tutorial on GraphQL. Information about the tutorial is available at https://www.ida.liu.se/research/semanticweb/events/GraphQLTutorialAtISWC2019.shtml.

Patrick Lambrix and Huanyu Li co-organized two tracks in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (the Anatomy track and the Interactive track).

Further, the group presented two posters:
Keskisärkkä R, Li H, Cheng S, Carlsson N, Lambrix P, An Ontology for Ice Hockey,

and

Li H, Armiento R, Lambrix P, Extending Ontologies in the Nanotechnology Domain using Topic Models and Formal Topical Concept Analysis on Unstructured Text.

Our colleague Catia Pesquita from Lisbon University is presenting a paper, co-authored by Valentina Ivanova and Patrick Lambrix of our group and Steffen Lohmann from Fraunhofer, at EKAW 2018 – 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, on a framework to conduct and report on empirical user studies in Semantic Web contexts. As organizers of the VOILA workshops on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data  at the recent ISWC conferences, we noticed that both the assessment of interactive Semantic Web approaches as well as the reporting on conducted user studies still suffer from weaknesses.
Empirical evaluations are essential to compare different approaches, demonstrate their benefits and reveal their drawbacks, and thus to facilitate further adoption of Semantic Web technologies. In our paper, we review empirical user studies of user interfaces, visualizations and interaction techniques recently published at several Semantic Web venues, assessing both the user studies themselves and their reporting. We then chart the design space of available methods for user studies in Semantic Web contexts. Finally, we propose a framework for their comprehensive reporting, taking into consideration user expertise, experimental setup, task design, experimental procedures and results analysis.

The original publication is at doi. A self-archived postprint version of the article is available at Linköping University Institutional Repository (DiVA).

Next week, the 27th edition of The Web Conference (earlier called International World Wide Web Conference – WWW) will take place in Lyon, France, and different results of Semantic Web research at LiU will be present at the conference.

First, there is a research paper in the main research track of the conference by our Olaf Hartig and Jorge Pérez from the Universidad de Chile. The title of the paper is “Semantics and Complexity of GraphQL.”

Additionally, Olaf will give an invited talk in the Web Stream Processing workshop at the conference. While the exact title of the talk is yet to be decided, the talk will present recent work about the RDF*/SPARQL* Approach to Statement-Level Metadata in RDF.

Find Olaf and talk to him if you also happen to be in the conference; he will be happy to tell you more about his research, as well as our other Semantic Web related research at LiU.