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LiU Semantic Web research at The Web Conference 2018

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.

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Valentina Ivanova defended her PhD thesis on Fostering User Involvement in Ontology Alignment and Alignment Evaluation

On January 26, our PhD candidate Valentina Ivanova defended successfully her thesis with the title “Fostering User Involvement in Ontology Alignment and Alignment Evaluation.”
This thesis focuses on supporting users during the cognitively intensive ontology alignment process and makes several contributions.

First, front- and back-end system features that foster user involvement during the alignment process were identified and their support has been investigated in existing systems Then this was further narrowed down to investigate features in connection to manual validation while also considering the level of user expertise by assessing the impact of user errors on alignments’ quality. As developing and aligning ontologies is an error-prone task, there is also an investigation on the benefits of the integration of ontology alignment and debugging.
Further, interactive comparative exploration and evaluation of multiple alignments at different levels of detail was enabled by developing a dedicated visual environment—Alignment Cubes—which allows for alignments’ evaluation even in the absence of reference alignments.
Finally, inspired by the latest technological advances three promising directions for the application of large, high-resolution displays in the field were identified: improving the navigation in the ontologies and their alignments, supporting reasoning and collaboration between users.

Valentina’s work on the thesis was supervised by Patrick Lambrix, and co-supervised by Nahid Shahmehri. The opponent was Fabien Gandon from INRIA, France. The examination committee consisted of Oscar Corcho from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Mathieu d’ Aquin from the National University of Ireland Galway and Claes Lundström from Sectra and Linköping University. Mattias Arvola from Linköping University was backup examination committee member.

Find the thesis in the Diva portal.

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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.