Semantic Web Group at ISWC 2021

Our group contributed in several ways to ISWC 2021.

Eva Blomqvist was Research Track PC co-chair for ISWC 2021 and Olaf Hartig was a senior PC member.

Ying Li and Patrick Lambrix presented the poster ‘An Approach for Repairing Incoherent Ontologies Repairing’. The teaser video for this paper was selected as best teaser video. The paper is available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2980/paper372.pdf and the teaser video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQCWGBFhhRw.

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 Catia Pesquita and Vitalis Wiens organized VOILA 2021 – the 6th International Workshop on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data. At VOILA 2021, Mina Abd Nikooie Pour, Huanyu Li and Patrick Lambrix, together with Rickard Armiento presented the paper ‘A First Step towards a Tool for Extending Ontologies’. Ying Li and Patrick Lambrix, together with former member of the group Zlatan Dragisic presented ‘RepOSE-CTab – A Protégé Plugin for Completing Ontologies’.

Successful workshop on Ontologies for Materials-Databases Operability

Patrick Lambrix, together with Rickard Armiento, Welzel Andersen, Gareth Conduit, Luca Ghiringhelli, and Cormac Toher, and advised by Saulius Gražulis, Giovanni Pizzi, Gian-Marco Rignanese and Markus Scheidgen, organized OMDI 2021 – Workshop on Ontologies for Materials-Databases Interoperability on October 5-7, 2021 as a hybrid workshop with Linköping University as host.

The workshop had sessions on Ontologies and their place in open science, Ontologies for data exchange, Ontologies in materials science, Ontologies for materials properties, Ontologies for data integration, and Ontology use in applications. Each session had several invited speakers and ample time for discussion. There was also a poster session.

From our group there were presentations by Patrick Lambrix on debugging and completing ontologies and Huanyu Li about the Materials Design Ontology developed by our group.

Recordings of the sessions will be made available via the workshop home page.

Semantic Web Group at ISWC 2020

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.

2019 Highlights – publications on ontologies

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

2019 Highlights – Awards and grants

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.