Semantic Web research at LiU

Our group contributed in several ways to ISWC 2020.

Huanyu Li and Patrick Lambrix, together with Rickard Armiento presented a paper on a new ontology for the materials science domain. The ontology presented in “An Ontology for the Materials Design Domain” is available at https://w3id.org/mdo; the paper at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_14.

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

Patrick Lambrix, together with Valentina Ivanova, Catia Pesquita and Vitalis Wiens organized VOILA 2020 – the 5th International Workshop on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data.

Olaf Hartig received an honorable mention as outstanding SPC member.

Eva Blomqvist will be Research Track PC co-chair for ISWC 2021.

Four journal articles were published on the group’s work on ontologies.

In Li et al. we focus on user validation in ontology alignment and discuss issues related to  the profile of the user, the services of the alignment system, and its user interface. Recommendations for tool support for each aspect are given and the support in current systems is presented.  The paper reports that while there have been significant advances on the part of alignment systems in these areas, there are still key challenges to overcome such as reducing user workload, balancing informativeness with cognitive load and balancing user workload with user errors.

Li H, Dragisic Z, Faria D, Ivanova V, Jimenez-Ruiz E, Lambrix P, Pesquita C, User validation in ontology alignment: functional assessment and impact, The Knowledge Engineering Review 34:e15, 2019. doi: 10.1017/S0269888919000080

 

Further, we applied our expertise in two application domains. In Dorea et al. we collaborated with, among others, the Swedish National Veterinary Institute in the development of an ontology for Animal Health Surveillance. In Li, Armiento and Lambrix we extended two ontologies in the materials science domain with a focus on nanomaterials.

Dorea F, Vial F, Hammar K, Lindberg A, Lambrix P, Blomqvist E, Revie C, Drivers for the development of an Animal Health Surveillance Ontology (AHSO), Preventive Veterinary Medicine 166:39-48, 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2019.03.002

Li H, Armiento R, Lambrix P, A Method for Extending Ontologies with Application to the Materials Science Domain, Data Science Journal, 18(1):Article 50, 2019. doi: 10.5334/dsj-2019-050

 

Finally, Ivanova et al. introduces a special issue on visualization and interaction for ontologies and linked data and discusses issues related to cognitive support, user profiles and visual exploratory analysis.

Ivanova V, Lambrix P, Lohmann S, Pesquita C, Visualization and interaction for ontologies and linked data – Editorial, Journal of Web Semantics, Special issue on Visualization and interaction for ontologies and linked data 55:145-149, 2019. doi: 10.1016/j.websem.2018.10.001

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).