Talks on Semantic Web

The Chair of Technical Information Systems is pleased to announce scientific talks from Prof. Dr. Aidan Hogan, Universidad de Chile, and Dr. Juan Sequeda, Capsenta Inc., USA.

 

Date and time: September 7th, 2018 from 14:00 to 16:00

Location: Fraunhofer IIS, Nordostpark 84, Nuremberg (please register at the reception on arrival)

 

The Future of the Web: Data and Semantics

As we approach the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web, it seems an opportune time to ask: what will the Web look like in another 30 years time? One direction in which the Web has been evolving in the past years is to better support publication and integration of structured data (rather than unstructured documents), motivated by the goal of automating a wide range of tasks that the human users of today must still perform manually: the technical infrastructure of the Web of today is poorly equipped to automatically locate, integrate and draw meaning from information spread over multiple sources. Addressing this limitation of the Web has been the core focus of the Semantic Web community. This talk will motivate and introduce the Semantic Web, discussing the main research questions that the community addresses, providing an overview of the results (and applications) achieved thus far, as well as highlighting some of the current limitations and key open questions left to resolve. The talk will thus address some key weaknesses of the contemporary Web, how it may evolve to better support structured data, and how that might reflect on the Web of tomorrow (or indeed of thirty year’s time).

Speaker Biography

Aidan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chile and an Associate Researcher in the Foundations of Data Institute. His main research interests centre on the Semantic Web, with a particular focus on large-scale querying and processing of structured data on the Web. Within that scope, he has published a wide range of contributions relating to topics such as indexing, query processing, distributed systems, data quality, reasoning, knowledge representation, graph databases, data mining, security, user interfaces, and so forth. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Semantic Web Journal and the Journal of Web Semantics. He has given invited talks at a variety of international events, including several Summer School lectures, and more recently, at AMW 2017 and PROFILES 2018.

For further information, see http://aidanhogan.com/.

Integrating Semantic Web in the Real World: A journey between two cities

An early vision in Computer Science has been to create intelligent systems capable of reasoning on large amounts of data. Today, this vision can be delivered by integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web using the W3C standards: a graph data model (RDF), ontology language (OWL), mapping language (R2RML) and query language (SPARQL). The research community has successfully been showing how intelligent systems can be created with Semantic Web technologies, dubbed now as Knowledge Graphs.
However, where is the mainstream industry adoption? What are the barriers to adoption? Are these engineering and social barriers or are they open scientific problems that need to be addressed?
This talk will chronicle our journey of deploying Semantic Web technologies with real world users to address Business Intelligence and Data Integration needs, describe technical and social obstacles that are present in large organizations, and scientific and engineering challenges that require attention.

Speaker Biography

Juan F. Sequeda is the co-founder of Capsenta, a spin-off from his research, and the Senior Director of Capsenta Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are on the intersection of Logic and Data and in particular between the Semantic Web and Relational Databases for data integration, ontology based data integration and semantic/graph data management. Juan is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, received 2nd Place in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge for his work on ConstituteProject.org, Best Student Research Paper at the 2014 International Semantic Web Conference and the 2015 Best Transfer and Innovation Project awarded by Institute for Applied Informatics. Juan has been the General Chair of 2018 Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Databases (AMW2018), PC chair of the ISWC 2017 In-Use track, is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Web Semantics and member of multiple program committees (ISWC, ESWC, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI). Juan is a member of the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) Graph Query Languages task force and has also been an invited expert and standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).