Success for DDIS at ISWC 2017

10. November 2017 | Suzanne Tolmeijer | Keine Kommentare |

This year’s ISWC conference in Vienna proved successful for DDIS: two main track papers, two workshop papers, a tutorial, a workshop, and a keynote speech at the doctoral consortium by Prof. Abraham Bernstein. Join us in a report about the highlights.

This year’s edition of the 16^th International Semantic Web Conference, an important conference in the field, was visited by three of DDIS’s group members: Tobias Grubenmann, Dr. Daniele Dell’Aglio and Prof. Dr. Abraham Bernstein.

One of the main track papers, ‘Challenges of source selection in the WoD’ (1), presented by Tobias, was selected as a spotlight paper. It argues for a renewed effort to find novel join-cardinality approximation techniques for source selection or a change of paradigm in query execution to settings, after showing the limitations of Bloom Filters.

Tobias presenting ‘Challenges of source selection in the WoD’

The second research, ‘Computing Authoring Tests from Competency Questions: Experimental Validation’ (2), was co-authored by Daniele. The paper experimentally investigates a technique, Competency Question Ontology Authoring, to see if it does what it promises: assess if an ontology is actually capturing users’ expectations.

Daniele and Tobias also presented two papers at the DeSemWeb workshop. Daniele presented a paper titled ‘On a Web of Data Streams’ (3). Streams are getting more and more popular, but there is no agreement on which protocols and rules we should follow for exchanging and processing them on the web. This article summarizes the requirements we need to address to realize a Web of data streams, and proposes a novel protocol, WeSP, and shows its feasibility.

The other paper, titled ‘Decentralizing the Semantic Web: Who will pay to realize it?’ (4), was presented by Tobias. The vision of a marketplace for decentralized data following basic Web of Data principles and its challenges were discussed.

A workshop on Web Stream Processing, co-hosted by Daniele, targeted the community interested in stream processing in the semantic web context. The event attracted more than 30 attendees, with six talks discussing ongoing studies on stream processing, from querying streams in the web to theoretical results on stream reasoning. (5)

Daniele also co-ran a tutorial called How to Build a Stream Reasoning Application on techniques used to perform reasoning over data streams. After starting with the foundations on extensions of RDF and SPARQL to manage streams, methods to perform DL and ASP were discussed and tried out by the participants. (6)

Finally, Abraham Bernstein and Natasha Noy of Google gave a keynote at the Doctoral Consortium. The keynote named “Is this really Science: Evaluating research contributions” gave an overview to the scientific method and its evaluation in the Semantic Web domain. The keynote was well received – it was even tweeted about by senior researchers from the semantic web community.

Abraham and Natasha presenting (picture by Lora Aroyo via Twitter)

Natasha and Abraham wrote up the key points of the presentation in their report called “Is This Really Science? The Semantic Webber’s Guide to Evaluating Research Contributions”. (7)

It was a fruitful conference at a great venue, and we look forward to the next edition!