Preview: ISWC Semantic Web In-Use track

This past week we (Achille Fokoue & myself) sent the paper notifications for the 2013 International Semantic Web Conference’s In-Use Track. The track seeks to highlight innovative semantic technologies being applied and deployed in practice. With the selection made by the program committee (Thanks!), I think we have definitely achieved that goal.

So if you’re coming to Sydney (& you should definitely be coming to Sydney) here’s what’s in store. (Papers are listed below.) You’ll see  a number of papers where semantic technologies are being deployed in companies to help end users including:

• how semantic technologies are helping the BBC expose its archive to its journalists [1];
• how OWL and RDF and being combined to give energy saving tips to 300,000 customers at EDF [2];
• and how the search result pages in Yahoo! Search are being improved through the use ofknowledge bases [3].

Streaming

Dealing with streaming data has been a growing research theme in recent years. In the in-use track, we are seeing some of the fruits of that research in particular with respect to monitoring city events.  Balduini et al. report on the use of Streaming Linked Data Framework for monitoring the London Olympic Games 2012 and Milano Design Week 2013. (Yes, the semantic web is fashionable) [4]. IBM will present its work on the real-time urban monitoring of Dublin – requiring both scale but also low-latency solutions [5].

Life sciences

Semantic technologies have a long history of being deployed in healthcare and life sciences. We’ll see that again at this year’s conference. We get a progress report on the usage of these technologies in the development of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) [6]. ICD-11 involves 270 domain experts using the iCAT tool. We see how the intermixing (plain-old) spreadsheets and semantic technologies is enabling systems biology to better share its data [7]. In the life sciences, and in particular in drug discovery, both public and private data are critical, we see how the Open PHACTS project is tackling the problem of intermixing such data [8].

Semantics for Science & Research

Continuing on the science theme, the track will have reports on improving the reliability of scientific workflows [9], how linked data is being leverage to understand the economic impact of R&D in Europe [10]; and how our community is “eating its own dogfood” to enable better scientometric analysis of journals [11].  Lastly, you’ll get a talk on  the use of semantic annotations to help crowd source 3D representations of Greek Pottery for cultural heritage (a paper that I just think is so cool – I hope for videos) [12].

Semantic Data Availability

Reasoning relies on the availability of data exposed with its associated semantics. We’ve seen how the Linking Open Data movement helped bootstrap the uptake of Semantic Web technologies. Likewise, the widespread deployment of RDFa and microformats have dramatically increased the amount of data availability. But what’s out there? Bizer et al. give us a report based on analyzing  3 billion web pages. (I expect some awesome charts in this presentation) [13].

Enriching data with semantics has benefits but also comes at a cost. Based on a case study of converting Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s FactPages, we’ll get insight into those trade-offs [14].  Reducing the effort for such conversations and particularly interlinking is a key challenge. The Cross-language Service Retrieve system is tackling this for open government data across multiple languages [15].

Finally, in practice, a key way to “semantize” data is through the use of natural language processing tools. You’ll see how semantic tech is facilitating the reusability and interoperability of NLP tools using NIF 2.0 framework [16].

Conclusion

I hope you’ll agree that this really represents the best from the semantic web community. These 16 papers were selected from 79 submissions. The program committee (for the most part)  did a great job both with their reviewers and importantly the discussion. Any many cases it was a hard decision and the PCs ability to discuss and revise their views was crucial in making the final selection. Thanks to the PC, it is a lot of work to do and we definitely asked them to do it in a fairly compact way. Thank you!

A couple of other thoughts, I think decision to institute an abstract submission for the in-use track was a good one and that author rebuttals are more helpful than I thought they would be.

ISWC 2013 is going to be a fantastic conference. I’m looking forward to the location, the sessions and the community. I look forward to seeing you there. There are many ways to participate so check out http://iswc2013.semanticweb.org. 

Papers

1. Yves Raimond, Michael Smethurst, Andrew McParland and Christopher Lowis. Using the past to explain the present: interlinking current affairs with archives via the Semantic Web
2. Pierre Chaussecourte, Birte Glimm, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik and Laurent Pierre. The Energy Management Adviser at EDF
3. Roi Blanco, Berkant Barla Cambazoglu, Peter Mika and Nicolas Torzec. Entity recommendations in Web Search
4. Marco Balduini, Emanuele Della Valle, Daniele Dell’Aglio, Themis Palpanas, Mikalai Tsytsarau and Cristian Confalonieri. Social listening of City Scale Events using the Streaming Linked Data Framework
5. Simone Tallevi-Diotallevi, Spyros Kotoulas, Luca Foschini, Freddy Lecue and Antonio Corradi. Real-time Urban Monitoring in Dublin using Semantic and Stream Technologies
6. Tania Tudorache, Csongor I Nyulas, Natasha F. Noy and Mark Musen. Using Semantic Web in ICD-11: Three Years Down the Road
7. Katherine Wolstencroft, Stuart Owen, Olga Krebs, Quyen Ngyuen, Jacky. L. Snoep, Wolfgang Mueller and Carole Goble. Semantic Data and Models Sharing in systems Biology: The Just Enough Results Model and the SEEK Platform
8. Carole Goble, Alasdair J. G. Gray, Lee Harland, Karen Karapetyan, Antonis Loizou, Ivan Mikhailov, Yrjana Rankka, Stefan Senger, Valery Tkachenko, Antony Williams and Egon Willighagen. Incorporating Private and Commercial Data into an Open Linked Data Platform for Drug Discovery
9. José Manuel Gómez-Pérez, Esteban García-Cuesta, Aleix Garrido and José Enrique Ruiz. When History Matters – Assessing Reliability for the Reuse of Scientific Workflows
10. Amrapali Zaveri, Joao Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci, Cinzia Daraio and Ricardo Pietrobon. Using Linked Data to evaluate the impact of Research and Development in Europe: a Structural Equation Model
11. Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Grant Mckenzie, Kunal Sengupta and Pascal Hitzler. A Linked Data-driven Semantically-enabled Journal Portal for Scientometrics
12. Chih-Hao Yu, Tudor Groza and Jane Hunter. Reasoning on crowd-sourced semantic annotations to facilitate cataloguing of 3D artefacts in the cultural heritage domain
13. Christian Bizer, Kai Eckert, Robert Meusel, Hannes Mühleisen, Michael Schuhmacher and Johanna Völker. Deployment of RDFa, Microdata, and Microformats on the Web – A Quantitative Analysis
14. Martin G. Skjæveland, Espen H. Lian and Ian Horrocks. Publishing the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s FactPages as Semantic Web Data
15. Fedelucio Narducci, Matteo Palmonari and Giovanni Semeraro. Cross-language Semantic Retrieval and Linking of E-gov Services
16. Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer and Martin Brümmer. Integrating NLP using Linked Data

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• in-use
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• semantic web