ESWC 2007 - 4th European Semantic Web Conference - Aftermath

While the original conference ended yesterday evening after the conference dinner, ESWC continues for another two days with workshops, phD-forum, etc. Unfortunately, I had to leave Innsbruck this morning, because there are lectures I have to give. The interesting workshops (at least for me) are taking place on Thursday. Thus, wednesday would have been 'spare time'. From my point of view, if organising two days of workshops, they would have been better splitted to one day before and one day after the conference.
Anyway, ESWC with only two days of presentations is rather short. To draw some resume, it was.....let's say it was a nice conference. Two out of four invited talks were interesting (best one about monadic 2nd order logic and data extraction tool lixto by Georg Gottlob), another one was rather bizzare (just remember brains(!) and buzzwords). Some of the full paper presentations were rather weak (I was wondering why they got accepted) and some of the poster presentations or demos on the other hand were rather interesting (and would have served even better as full presentations).

Innsbruck congess center was rather agreable (stable wlan support, acceptable coffee and lunch...I really appreciated the Austrian sweets). On the last day -- due to a lack in coffee support -- the sessions got a little bit out of sync and thus, it was difficult to switch in between the presentations (as you can read in day 02). Innsbruck is an interesting city with a rather nice historic center (at least as far as I could see...with masses of asian/american tourists). Surrounded by huge mountains, one gets a strange feeling of being closed away from the rest of the world. But, let's get back to the conference dinner. The food was excellent (I really appreciated the 'frozen Kaiserschmarrn' and now I know that Tyroleans are also very proud of 'dumplings' of any kind...). I tried the red wine (Zweigelt Classic 2006 from Rotweingut Iby, Horitschon), but it was more or less 'unsignificant' (a little bit like cherry, accentuation on acids....absolutely no comparison to the St. Magdalener I had the week before at Bertagnolli's at home in Weimar). In the end of the confeence dinner, the new conference location for eswc 2008 was presented: Tenerife on the Canary Islands (Spain)!! I've never been there for a conference, but I'm looking forward to it. Next, the 'show part' was on the schedule. People said that there was some 'ballet dancing' to expect.....so I was curious to see some - let's say maybe typical Tyrolean dance. Don't ask....the dancer to come maybe was Tyrolean.....but it was belly dancing with Arabian/Turkish music. Dont get me wrong. I am the last one not to like belly dancing :) ... But, really I expected something more typical for the region... Afterwards the conference party started (including music and dancing).

All in all, it was a nice conference (but of course there's always something to improve). Although, this time there was no 'mind blowing' paper/presentation, meeting friends (old and new ones), exchanging news and planning new projects are the things that a conference is all about. Therefore, I'm looking forward to eswc 2008 in Teneriffe.

BTW, you may find a lot of pictures from ESWC 2007 here at flickr.

Other folks blogging about ESWC 2007:

• Kasei's Life on Mars


• Semantic Web & Web 2.0

ESWC 2007 - European Semantic Web Conference, Innsbruck (Day 02)

Another warm early summer morning in Innsbruck. The poster session yesterday (official end 8pm) at least for me ended a about 10pm. After my short walk from the train station to Innsbruck congress center the 2nd day of the ESWC 2007 again starts with an invided talk.

Keynote 3 - 9.00 - 10.00
Georg Gottlob from Oxford University presents a talk on 'The Lixto systems applications in Business Intelligence and Semantic Web'. He addresses the question on how knowledge about market developments and competitor activities on the market can be extracted dynamically and automatically from semi-structured information sources on the Web. As a logic foundation, he proposes to use monadic second order (MSO) logic, which captures exactly the essence of data extraction (define sets of nodes for a document, re-label tree nodes as monadic predicates, get rid of irrelevant predicates...that's what data extraction is about). Next, the extracted data can be classified, re-assigned and transformed with the aid of Semantic Web ontological domain knowledge. All these techniques are combined in the (commercial) Lixto Visual Wrapper application (for non-commercial use Lixto is freely available. Just write an email to Robert Baumgartner).

Natural Language and Ontologies / Applications session - 10.30 - 12.00
Again, I decided to share two sessions this morning, the Applications session first and later switching to the Natural Language and Ontologies session. The application session starts with a talk from Sören Auer on 'What have Innsbruck and Leipzig in common? Extracting Semantics from Wiki Content'. The idea is to use those data from Wikipedia that are (really) structures. Yes, besides unstructured text information, Wikipedia contains real structured data. E.g., for all geographic entities such as cities, countries, etc. all of them include a so called infobox at the right upper side of the article. Within the infobox (as being a fixed template) there you will find structured data such as population, area, etc. all structured in a similar way. Thus, being subject to easy data extraction. The next step was to encode the extracted data from the infoboxes (and others) into RDF statements (more than 8 millions for the English version of wikipedia). The application 'Query wikipedia' (there is also a blog) is based on the RDF database being extracted from wikipedia and is available on the web. 'Query wikipedia' is part of the community project 'DBpedia', which offers several alternative user inferfaces for wikipedia data and aims to integrate (structured as well as unstructured) wikipedia data with other data resources on the web.

Next, Tudor Groza from DERI Galway presents a talk on 'SALT - Semantically Annotated LaTeX for scientific publications'. Normally - at least for HTML or PDF data - semantic metadata are created (if being created) a posteriori, i.e. after the actual writing process. Tudor proposes an authoring tool for generating semantic annotations concurrent to authoring the text (-> therfore, concurrent annotation). SALT deploys pdf as standard container for both annotation and document content while extending the LATEX writing environment to support the creation of metadata for scientific publications. More information about the SALT project including the underlying ontologies for representing document structure, annotations, as well as rethorical structre can be found here.

Unfortunately, I have missed an fierce argument (at least as Andreas told me...) taking place in the Natural Language and Ontologies session. But now, I'm listening to a talk given by Peyman Sazedj from Lisboa on 'Mining the web through verbs: a case study'. They focus on extracting relation instances -- in particular verbbased relation instantiationa -- among annotated entities. As a case study, they extracted verb relations from imdb biographies. Although the techniques being applied were not rather sophisticated (verb chunking and entity clustering, mapping verbs to relations from an ontology) the results on large text corpora seem promissing. The IMDb sample corpus is available here.

Keynote 4 - 14.00-15.00
The afternoon sessions start with a keynote given by Ron Bachman of Yahoo! Research on 'Emerging Sciences of the Internet: Some New Opportunities'. For positioning Yahoo! in that area of research he started his talk with a quote of Wayne Gretzky's father "Don't skate where the puck is, but where it will be...". Ok...now 20 minutes of talk are over and I'm still trying to figure out what his poit really is. We've seen a lot of recent buzzwords (including some old ones). I guess, if taking the heading into account, (at least I hope) that the talk should lead to 'critical' things to watch for in the near future (concerning the development of the web)...We'll see..Ok, now it is getting clearer. It's about a change in (computer) science. Bachman is refering to the ACM taxonomy of computer science as 'old' computer science (somehow reminds me of 'the old Europe...'). In relation to that he defines areas of 'new' computer science as, e.g. 'finding' science (beyond search), community science, algorithmic advertising, computational micro-economics, media experiences, data science...that of course can also be (somehow) subsumed in the ACM taxonomy. So all comes down to some 'new' research challenges according to Yahoo!

Querying and Web Data Models / Ontology Engineering II / Personalization
For the 2nd afternoon session I'm trying to achieve an 'Hattrick' by following all three parallel sessions. I'm starting in the Ontology Engineering II seesion with Enrico Motta's presentation on 'Integrating Folksonomies with the Semantic Web'. Starting with limitations on current tagging (different granularity, multilinguality, spelling errors) leading to a very low search recall, giving meaning to tags is an essential issue. Connecting tags with meaning (aka semantic web technology) will be fruitful in both directions. Of course for categorizing tags and enabling logical reasoning over tags, as well as (in the other direction) learning ontologies from tags.

The last talk started with some delay and in addition I had to switch levels to get to the basement 'Strassburg' hall, where the next talk on the Querying and Web Data session is taking place. I was a little bit late, so I couldn't figue out, who of the paper's authors is presenting the paper on 'A Unified Approach to Retrieving Web Documents and Semantic Web Data' (I guess it is Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan). He distinguishes between the traditional hyperlinked web and the property-linked RDF-web and discusses a unified approach which formalizes the structure and the semantics of interconnections between them. Also a new hybrid query language for retrieving data and information from the unified web has been developed and integrated in a small prototype 'SITAR' (unfortunately not available on the web...).

Ok, up again 2 levels to the 'Grenoble' hall to the Personalization II session. Here, I'm a little bit too early for the next interesting talk, given by Serge Linckels from HPI Potsdam on 'Semantic Composition of Lecture Subparts for a Personalized e-Learning'. Strange, but he starts his talk with advertising HPI's tele-task lecture recording system...ok, just waiting for the connection to semantic web. Serge is presenting a prototype system that interconnects single learning objects (videos) with the help of a (manually crafted) domain ontology. Learning objects are also semantically annotated in a manual way. The ontology defines which topic (represented within the learning object) is dependent of other topics ( i.e. other learning objects). On this dependency structure (encoded in description logics), a closure is computed w.r.t. a given query and thus, a sequence of interdependent learning objects is presented as a result.

Finally, back to Ontology Engineering II, where Johanna Völker is presenting a talk on 'Acquisition of OWL DL Axioms from Lexical Resources'. Light-weight ontologies (that can easily be learned) are not sufficient for reasoning-based applications. Thus, Johanna discusses the question of refining these light-weight ontologies to achieve more complex class descriptions. Based on a deep syntactic analysis of natural language definitions they try to achieve ontologies with expressive axioms. The feasibility of the approach is shown by generating complex class descriptions from Wikipedia definitions and from a fishery glossary of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

This concludes the afternoon sessions (and the conference presentations). I'm looking forward to the conference dinner later that evening (8pm). Now, there's sufficient time for taking a walk in Innsbruck city center and to have some coffee.

[to be continued .... trrying to achieve 'live'-blogging]

ESWC 2007 - European Semantic Web Conference, Innsbruck (Day 01)

Today, the 4th European Semantic Web Conference starts in Innsbruck (Austria). I arrived already yesterday in the evening by train. By chance, I already met 2 other participants (Pascal Hitzler and Andreas Hotho ... -> bibsonomy) while waiting at Munich train station. Thus, the last part of the train ride was quite entertaining :)

Keynote 1 - 9.00 -10.00
Day 1 of ESWC 2007 is starting with a keynote of Stefano Ceri on 'Design Abstractions for Innovative Web Applications: the case of the SOA augmented with Semantics'. Sorry to say, but -- at least for me -- the talk was not really interesting. Since I am not so much interested in Semantic Web Services, I decided to spent the rest of the morning sessions (after the coffee break) in the Ontology Learning, Inference and Mapping session. In parallel there are session on Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web Use Cases (unfortunately in areas also not very interesting for me, i.e. mechatronics and e-Governement). But, I'm looking forward to the Ontology Engineering session....

Ontology Engineering I - 10.30 - 12.30
The Ontology Engineering session starts with Martin Hepp on 'GenTax: A Generic Methodology for Deriving OWL and RDF-S Ontologies from Hierarchical Classifications, Thesauri, and Inconsistent Taxonomies', where he is referring to a novel methodology for automatically deriving consistent RDF-S and OWL ontologies from informal hierarchies. He demonstrated the usefullness of the approach by utilizing it for transforming the two e-business categorization standards eCl@ss and UNSPSC into ontologies. The approach is based on drawing a random sample from an input classification, letting a human user confirm/reject/adapt the sample, and using this confirmed sample as a basis for further automated classification. The tool will be available here soon.

The second talk is presented by Maciej Janik on 'SPARQLeR: Extended Sparql for Semantic Association Discovery'. Semantic Associations (i.e. complex semantic relationships among entities) in knowledge bases have to be discovered, which comes to the process of finding paths of possibly unknown length that connect the given entities and have a specific semantics. SPARQL for querying RDF databses is extended for the discovery of such paths including the possibility of formulating regular expressions over properties for specifying the required semantics of the queried paths.

Eyal Oren from DERI Galway is speaking about 'Algorithms for Predicate Suggestions using Similarity and Co-Occurrence'. Only through shared vocabularies can meaning be established. Tagging Systems solve this problem by tag suggestions to achieve coherrent vocabulary. The same principle holds for creating distributed RDF databases. Therefore, two domain-independent algorithms for recommending predicates (RDF statements) about resources, based on statistical dataset analysis (i.e. on similarity and co-occurrence). Both algortihms are implemented in ActiveRDF.

Johanna Völker from AIFB Karlsruhe concludes the session with 'Learning Disjointness'. So, why disjointness is important? Of course disjointness axions allows infering new knowledge or modelling errors. But, most ontologies today don't provide disjointness axioms. Based on machine learning, an approach is presented to automated generation of disjointness axioms to be included into ontologies.

Lunchbreak -- as being in Austria I tried the traitional 'Schnitzel' (compared to German Schnitzel, Austrian Schnitzel are very flat :) )

Keynote 2 - 14.00 - 15.00
The afternoon session starts with a keynote given by Ning Zhong from Knowledgne Information System Laboratory on Ways to Develop Human-Level Web Intelligence: A Brain Informatics Perspective. Interesting thing, because I am very curious to know what 'Brain Informatics' should be... First, it's about Web Intelligence (WI). Short Definition: Web Intelligence = Artificial Intelligence + IT. Brain Informatics - on the other hand - is a new interdisciplinary field to study human information processing mechanisms systematically. It's on the intersection of cognitive science, neuro science and WI. The (H)uman brain is regarded as a (I)nformation (P)rocessing (S)ystem (HIPS). There is a gab between WI and Brain Science....
Ok....a little bit too much for me. After several (large) pictures of brains (but few content) I decided to spent the rest of the session down in the lobby. Another interesting phenomenon to mention: computer scientists gather around power outlets (at least in the afternoon, when all the batteries are getting low...)

Best paper Award Session - 15.00 - 16.00
Ok...the battery is back at 42% and the sessions continue with the best paper awards. This time, there are two best papers. The first is presented by Renee Witte from IPD Karlsruhe on 'Empowering Software Maintainers with Semantic Web Technologies'. One of the main challenges in software maintenance is to establish and maintain the semantic connections among all the different artifacts. Basically, the main contibution of the paper is on how Semantic Web technologies can deliver a unified representation (ontologies) to explore, query and reason about a multitude of software artifacts, mainly source code and other ducoments, for being deployed in security analysis, architectural evolution, and traceability recovery between source code and documents....Alas, what is still missing is a standard semantic enabled software development enviroment (e.g. as eclipse plugin...).
The other best paper is presented by Claudio Gutierrez on 'Minimal Deductive Systems for RDF'. We all use RDF for basic knowledge representation. Ofcourse - at least at first sight - RDF documents do look a little bit...lets say...complicated. But, have you ever thought about RDF containing redundancy that can be removed? That's what the authors propose by abandoning some of the RDF predicates while in the same time maintaining its semantic expressiveness. Thus, they obtain a streamlined fragment of RDFS which includes all the vocabulary that is relevant for describing data, avoiding vocabulary and semantics that theoretically corresponds to the definition of the structure of the language. Ok....but do we really want to abandon RDF and substitute it with this RDF core? As brilliant as the paper and the idea is, I guess (and so did also one of the questions to Claudio) in practice it will be only of little relevance..

Personalization I / Social Semantic Web - 16.30 - 18.00
For the 2nd afternoon session I have to switch between two of the parallel sessions. I start with the Personalization session and after the first talk I switch to Social Semantic Web.
Alistair Duke from Next Generation Web Research Group presents a talk on 'Squirrel: An Advanced Semantic Search and Browse Facility'. Squirrel is a tool for searching and browsing semantically annotated data. To achieve this, Squirrel provides combined keyword based search (providing ease of use and speed) and (powerful) semantic search in a hybrid approach. They comine several interesting technologies such as ontology management, named entity recognition on ontology generation and classification to enable features such as result consolidation, natural language generation, ontology based user profiling and device independence.

Ok...searching for the 'Saal Strassburg' was a little bit difficult (because of the missing signs). Thus, I am a little bit late for Jerome Euzenat's talk on 'Towards Semantic Social Networks'. He introduces a Semantic Social Network theory, based on a threelayered model, which involves the network between people (social network -> social layer), the network between the ontologies they use (ontology network -> ontology layer) and a network between concepts occurring in these ontologies ( -> concept layer). He proposes a similarity measure between concepts and is propagating this similarity to a distance and an alignment relation between ontologies (using these concepts). In addition, this distance relation can be used for discovering affinity in the social network (finding people that think the same way as you do...possibly).
The last talk of today is given by Nicholas John Kings on 'Knowledge Sharing on the Semantic Web'. 'The Semantic Web is Dead....', people just do tagging. With a slide like this, for sure you will get some attention (at a Semantic Web conference)...and Nicholas did :) After this eye-catching introduction, he introduces 'Squidz' a tool for automatically classifying browsed web pages against an ontology ('Spyware on Steroids...')), and allowing users to share comments made about those pages to members of a community. After all, the project is intended to test the hypothesis that information sharing is more effective when the software is aware of both the social and technical context of that information. Thus, leading to a hybrid approach combining folkosonies (free annotations of web pages) with formal ontologies.

So....just looking forward to the poster session (and the included dinner of course) and another power outlet, because the batteries are down to 8%(!).

[ok...switching to day 02 .... again trying to achieve 'live blogging'...]