Workshops on Sunday, Oct. 11 2015
- Full Day
- Morning
- Afternoon
Workshops on Monday, Oct. 12 2015
- Full Day
- Morning
- Afternoon
Workshop Descriptions
Full Day
1st Workshop on LINKed EDucation 2015
https://linked2015.wordpress.
The 1st Workshop on LINKed EDucation at the ISWC 2015 will bring together researchers, practitioners, and students to discuss the dual relationship between technology enhanced learning and the Semantic Web. This is a rich field, which covers a wide range of aspects: the use of modern eLearning approaches to train the next generation of Semantic Web scholars and developers; novel skills development frameworks that acknowledge the rise of SemanticWeb related professions; existing courseware, platforms, and curricula; as well as semantic technologies enabled eLearning solutions. The discussion will be framed in the broader context of Web and data science, which bring in an interdisciplinary perspective with roots in social sciences, the humanities, business analytics, and numerical methods.
ISWC2015 Developers Workshop
Unfortunately, the Developers Workshop has been canceled.
Perhaps more than anything, the Semantic Web needs applications: code that glues together datasets and libraries to do something useful with Linked Data. Developers play a crucial role in this, and the ISWC2015 Developers Workshop brings them together to discuss about implementations, methods, techniques, and working software the brings semantics to life. In contrast to the main and demo tracks of ISWC, we do focus on implementation-specific technical details. We welcome applications, libraries, repositories, and more, and are curious to learn about the rationale behind your design decisions. Join us for an exciting day of code, and get to know the people behind it!
LD4IE - Linked Data for Information Extraction
http://oak.dcs.shef.ac.uk/
This workshop focuses on the exploitation of Linked Data for Web Scale Information Extraction (IE), which concerns extracting structured knowledge from unstructured/semi-structured documents on the Web. One of the major bottlenecks for the current state of the art in IE is the availability of learning materials (e.g., seed data, training corpora), which, typically are manually created and are expensive to build and maintain. Linked Data (LD) defines best practices for exposing, sharing, and connecting data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using uniform means such as URIs and RDF. It has so far been created a gigantic knowledge source of Linked Open Data (LOD), which constitutes a mine of learning materials for IE. However, the massive quantity requires efficient learning algorithms and the unguaranteed quality of data requires robust methods to handle redundancy and noise. LD4IE intends to gather researchers and practitioners to address multiple challenges arising from the usage of LD as learning material for IE tasks, focusing on (i) modelling user defined extraction tasks using LD; (ii) gathering learning materials from LD assuring quality (training data selection, cleaning, feature selection etc.); (ii) robust learning algorithms for handling LD; (iv) publishing IE results to the LOD cloud.
The 10th International Workshop on Ontology Matching (OM-2015)
http://om2015.
Ontology matching is a key interoperability enabler for the Semantic Web, as well as a useful tactic in some classical data integration tasks dealing with the semantic heterogeneity problem. It takes the ontologies as input and determines as output an alignment, that is, a set of correspondences between the semantically related entities of those ontologies. These correspondences can be used for various tasks, such as ontology merging, data translation, query answering or navigation on the web of data. Thus, matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed in the matched ontologies to interoperate. Approaches to ontology matching have become a mainstream area of Semantic Web research. We expect that ISWC 2015 technical program will have several papers presenting different methods for ontology matching (just like previous ISWCs did). Therefore, we do not plan to solicit presentations on matching methods per se. Rather, the workshop has the following goals:
- To bring together leaders from academia, industry and user institutions to assess how academic advances are addressing real-world requirements. The workshop will strive to improve academic awareness of industrial and final user needs, and therefore, direct research towards those needs. Simultaneously, the workshop will serve to inform industry and user representatives about existing research efforts that may meet their requirements. The workshop will also investigate how the ontology matching technology is going to evolve.
- To conduct an extensive and rigorous evaluation of ontology matching and instance matching (link discovery) approaches through the OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative ) 2015 campaign. OAEI 2015, besides real-world specific matching tasks, involving e.g., large biomedical ontologies, will introduce linked data benchmarks. Companies, such as IBM, will also provide specific matching scenarios and datasets. Therefore, the ontology matching evaluation initiative itself will provide a solid ground for discussion of how well the current approaches are meeting business needs.
- To examine new uses, similarities and differences from database schema matching, which has received decades of attention but is just beginning to transition to mainstream tools.
NLP & DBpedia 2015
https://nlpdbpedia2015.wordpre
The DBpedia community has experienced an immense increase in activity in the past years, both in usage of DBpedia as a knowledge base in numerous applications, as well as in research on improving the curation of DBpedia. In particular, it has been used both for NLP applications, as well as NLP has been applied to DBpedia as a means to improve the knowledge base. We believe that the time has come to explore the connection between DBpedia & Natural Language Processing (NLP) in a yet unprecedented depth. DBpedia has a long-standing tradition to provide useful data as well as a commitment to reliable Semantic Web technologies and living best practices. With the rise of WikiData, DBpedia is step-by-step relieved from the tedious extraction of data from Wikipedia’s infoboxes and can shift its focus on new challenges such as extracting information from the unstructured article text as well as becoming a testing ground for multilingual NLP methods.
The 6th Semantic Smart City Workshop: Beyond Linked Data to Models, Standards, Reasoning, and Interoperability
http://kat.ee.surrey.ac.uk/wss
To bring clarity and foster communication between researchers, domain experts, city and local government officials. To explore the interfaces between the Web, the Web of Data, and the city; to explore how the Web, and the intelligences built on top of, and around the Web, can make the notion of the smart connected city possible and realizable. To provide a forum for sharing best practices and pragmatic concerns between researchers and domain experts. To draw attention to research challenges and opportunities in semantic cities. To foster the develop- ment of standard ontologies for city knowledge. To discuss the multi-disciplinary and synergistic nature of the different sub-domains of Semantic Cities, e.g. in transportation, energy, water management, building, health care, etc. And, to identify the technical and pragmatic challenges needed to mature the technolo- gies behind Semantic Cities.
Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data (IESD 2015)
https://iesd2015.wordpress.
IESD’15 will provide a forum to discuss approaches for exploring semantic data, including structured and unstructured data. Semantic data is available widely and semantic data exploration is becoming a key activity in a range of application domains, such as government organisations, education, life science, cultural heritage, and media. Several novel interfaces and interaction means for exploration of semantic data are being proposed, for example semantic data browsers, ontology/content visualisation environments and semantic wikis. Although on the rise, the current solutions are still maturing and need to take into account human factors to make exploration intuitive or employ necessary computational models to inject personalisation and aid the intuitiveness and improve the effectiveness of exploration tasks. Lessons also can be learned from the commonalities and differences in exploration requirements between different domains. Hence, greater benefits can be achieved by bringing together expertise from different communities, including HCI, Semantic Web, and personalisation with the potential application domain demands. IESD’15 will continue, following the success of the past three workshops, including at ISWC 2014 (https://iesd14.wordpress.com), bringing together different disciplines related to semantic data exploration and form an international community to identify the major challenges and research directions. 43 experts from 16 countries belonging to HCI, Semantic Web and personalisation community are invited as PC members. At the time of submission, 24 PC members are already confirmed
First Joint International Workshop on Semantic Sensor Networks and Terra Cognita
http://event.cwi.nl/ssn-tc-
The wide availability of technologies such as GPS, map services and social networks, has resulted in the proliferation of geospatial data on the Web. Similarly, the amount of geospatial data extracted from the Web and published as Linked Data is increasing. Together with large volumes of machine-generated data from sensor networks and the emerging internet of things, these continually growing data have given rise to a number of innovative services and applications. This workshop aims to provide an inter-disciplinary forum to explore and promote the technologies related to a combination of semantic web, geospatial web and sensor networking. Specifically, to develop an understanding of the ways semantic web technologies can contribute to the growth, integration and deployment of geospatial applications. As a joint workshop, it will explore both foundational technologies of the Semantic Geospatial Web and applications of semantic technologies to large-scale sensor networks and the emerging web of things. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, as well as interested parties from industry and government, to advance the frontiers of these emerging research areas. This field continues to gain popularity, resulting in a need for a forum to discuss relevant issues.
11th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2015)
http://www.ssws-ws.org/SSWS201
SSWS 2015 is the eleventh edition of the successful Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems workshop series. This workshop provides a forum for discussing scalability issues for the Semantic Web, with the focus on the development and deployment of knowledge base systems for processing Semantic Web data. We expect that scalability issues are going to challenge the Semantic Web for a long time and significant effort is needed in order to tackle them. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to share their recent ideas and advances towards building scalable knowledge base systems for the Semantic Web.
The 6th International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD)
http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/
The quantity of published Linked Data continues to increase. However, applications that consume Linked Data are not yet widespread. Reasons may include a lack of suitable methods for a number of open problems, including the seamless integration of Linked Data from multiple sources, dynamic discovery of available data and data sources, provenance and information quality assessment, application development environments, and appropriate end user interfaces. Addressing these issues requires well- founded research, including the development and investigation of concepts that can be applied in systems which consume Linked Data from the Web. To provide a platform for discussion and work on these open research problems, we propose a workshop on consuming Linked Data at the 14th International Semantic Web Conference. Our main objective is to provide a venue for scientific discourse (including systematic analysis and rigorous evaluation) of concepts, algorithms and approaches for consuming Linked Data.
5th Workshop on Linked Science 2015 — Best Practices and the Road Ahead
http://linkedscience.
Scientific dissemination traditionally relies heavily on scholarly articles and presentations at conferences. However in the past few years, we have seen an increasing trend towards the publication of raw research data to facilitate verification and reuse. Linked Science champions the process of publishing, sharing and interlinking scientific resources and data along with complete experiment context, which is critical for understanding, reusing and verifying scientific research. Semantic Web technologies provide a promising means for achieving this practice. In the past four Linked Science workshops, we have focused on investigating benefits of this approach. However, there is a still huge knowledge gap in understanding how to support Linked Science, especially for nontechnical users who are new to this domain. To overcome this critical barrier to the adoption of the Linked Science approach, our 2015 edition proposes a focus on “Best Practices and the Road Ahead”, aiming for practical solutions that help applying Linked Science principles and open research discussions with regards to supporting this new practice. We are particularly interested in tools and workflows that could facilitate the practice of Linked Science, and investigations identifying challenges and gaps to be addressed, with a special focus on less technologysavvy users.
3rd Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web - Policy and Technology
http://privon.semanticweb.org/
Bruce Schneier’s article “The Internet is a surveillance state” summarised the state of Internet privacy as “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight”. Later, Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the US National Security Agency (NSA) were tracking online communication in a large scale surveillance programme known as PRISM. This was quickly followed by revelations that other countries were running similar covert operations. Last year, on the 25th anniversary of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee called on the world to take a stand against surveillance on the Web. He suggested to create a global digital bill of rights similar to the Magna Carta that can be used to safeguard privacy, limit censorship and protect against fragmentation of the Web. With this workshop we aim at raising awareness that the technologies the community are working on have global societal consequences. Vice versa, our research can be guided by a Magna Carta for the Web. This year’s workshop aims to build on previous workshops, by capturing the intersection between society, policy and technology, by contributing to the foundations of a global digital bill of rights and investigating how we can technologically support these foundations.
6th Workshop on Ontology and Semantic Web Patterns (WOP2015)
http://ontologydesignpatterns.
We propose a sixth edition of the Workshop on Ontology Patterns (WOP). The workshop series address topics centered around design patterns in SemanticWeb data and ontology design, e.g. related to the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative. As ontology design patterns have seen a sharp rise in attention in the U.S. recently, in particular due to the semi-anual ontology design pattern workshops known as GeoVoCamps, we expect to draw a sizeable audience. In particular, many frequent participants in the GeoVoCamps are usually not attending ISWC but may be attracted by the workshop, and we thus expect that the workshop will increase the outreach of ISWC. The WOP workshop aims at linking to standardization activities such as W3C working and community groups. Patterns can benet knowledge engineers and Semantic Web developers with a direct link to requirements, reuse, guidance, and better communication. They need to be shared by a community in order to provide a common language, hence the aim of this workshop is twofold: providing an arena for discussing patterns, pattern-based ontologies, systems, datasets, etc., and broadening the pattern community by developing its own "language" for discussing and describing relevant problems and their solutions. We propose a full-day workshop consisting of three parts: paper presentations, posters/demos, and a panel on strategic, forward-looking
topics.
Third International Workshop on Semantic Statistics (SemStats 2015)
The goal of this workshop is to explore and strengthen the relationship between the Semantic Web and statistical communities, to provide better access to the data held by statistical offices. It will focus on ways in which statisticians can use Semantic Web technologies and standards in order to formalize, publish, document and link their data and metadata. It follows two very successful edition of the Semantic Statistics workshop held at ISWC 2013 (SemStats 2013) and at ISWC 2014 (SemStats 2014). The statistical community has recently shown an interest in the Semantic Web. In particular, initiatives have been launched to develop semantic vocabularies representing statistical classifications and discovery metadata. Tools are also being created by statistical organizations to support the publication of dimensional data conforming to the Data Cube W3C Recommendation. But statisticians see challenges in the Semantic Web: how can data and concepts be linked in a statistically rigorous fashion? How can we avoid fuzzy semantics leading to wrong analyses? How can we preserve data confidentiality? The workshop will also cover the question of how to apply statistical methods or treatments to linked data, and how to develop new methods and tools for this purpose. Except for visualisation techniques and tools, this question is relatively unexplored, but the subject will obviously grow in importance in the near future.
Half Day
First Workshop on Mobile Deployment of Semantic Technologies (MoDeST)
Driven by the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless connectivity, recent work has studied how mobile systems can leverage the Semantic Web as an integrated & online knowledge platform. Example applications cover diverse domains such as context-awareness, augmented reality, recommender systems, tourism, and mHealth; for instance, leveraging geocoded semantic data to dynamically present the user with rich, location-specific information. At the same time, current studies show that, due to their unique restrictions, mobile systems require tailored data management, querying and reasoning solutions. Promising approaches include distributing query execution or reasoning across online query endpoints and services, thus outsourcing computationally intensive work; as well as achieving efficient and scalable data access locally on the device, avoiding issues such as intermittent connectivity and network data privacy. In any case, the highly dynamic nature of mobile systems, often requiring continuous adaptation to new scenarios, will introduce new challenges to semantic technologies. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and software practitioners with interest in developing tools & techniques for efficient storage, manipulation, querying of & reasoning over Semantic Web data on mobile platforms, as well as applications illustrating the effective use of Semantic Web knowledge in mobile settings.
VOILA 2015: Visualizations and User Interfaces for Ontologies and Linked Data
http://voila2015.
'A picture is worth a thousand words', we often say, yet many areas are in demand of sophisticated visualization techniques, and the Semantic Web is not an exception. The size and complexity of ontologies and Linked Data in the Semantic Web constantly grow and the diverse backgrounds of the users and application areas multiply at the same time. Providing users with visual representations and intuitive user interfaces can significantly aid the understanding of the domains and knowledge represented by ontologies and Linked Data. There is no one size fits all solution but different use cases demand different visualization and interaction techniques. Ultimately, providing better user interfaces and visual representations will foster user engagement and likely lead to higher quality results in different applications employing ontologies and to the proliferation of Linked Data usage
Semantic Web technologies for image and video analysis and analytics
http://mivia.unisa.it/swt4iva/
In the last years, a substantial body of work has focused on the development of cognitive approaches leveraging on a symbolic model representation of the objects belonging to a scene and their relations. Specifically in the domains of Video Surveillance and Ambient Intelligence, recent advances in image, multimedia and video analysis, as well as, in object detection and tracking, activity and gesture recognition have highlighted the need to move away from the traditional pattern matching and statistical approaches. Hybrid approaches that couple mining, learning and statistical reasoning with knowledge-driven solutions have emerged that support the development of more flexible, meaningful and robust solutions for improving the analytics aspects. Under this paradigm, Semantic Web technologies have attracted growing interest, bringing to the table the ability to formally capture intended semantics and to support automated reasoning, integration, management and sharing of information. However, the potential of Semantic Web technologies in addressing key requirements is yet to be fully explored: temporal reasoning, scalability, uncertainty handling, reasoning with noisy and missing information, as well as, the theoretical aspects that underpin the combination of Semantic Web technologies with other fields of research, such as open and closed-world assumption, impose new challenges. The workshop aims to favour the meeting of the Semantic Web, video and image analysis scholars and practitioners for facilitating the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in the domains of Video Surveillance and Ambient Intelligence. With this workshop we want to pave the way towards the proposition of novel hybrid approaches where results produced by traditional bottom-up low-level feature-based vision algorithms are fused with top-down approaches based on Semantic Web technologies.
METHOD 2015: The 4th International Workshop on Methods for Establishing Trust of (Open) Data
http://trustingwebdata.org/
International Workshop on Biomedical Data Mining, Modeling, and Semantic Integration: A Promising Approach to Solving Unmet Medical Needs (BDM2I 2015)
https://sbmi.uth.edu/
The amount of biomedical data has been increasing dramatically. First of all, there exists many structured datasets, such as DrugBank, DailyMed, Diseasome, SIDER, LinkedCT, just to name a few; however, often times such data are in silos and are not interlinked, thus preventing end users (e.g., researchers, clinicians, engineers, government agencies, and so on) from effectively utilizing such published data. Second, although the amount of structured data is growing, a large amount of information still lies hidden in unstructured data, especially for the biomedical and chemical engineering fields that are responsible for developing and commercializing medical products, including clinical notes, laboratory reports, medical literature, as well as in the ever increasing amount of social media data. To be able to mine valuable information from free text data, and to further integrate such extracted information to existing structured data will enable researchers and professionals to more effectively tackle their research problems from a more holistic perspective. Finally, the mined and integrated data is expected to enable solutions for notoriously difficult real-world problems: the design of higher quality and more cost-effective medicinal treatments for patients, better monitoring of drug use, drug repurposing, personalized medicine, etc. Addressing these problems of improving the healthcare needs of patients around the world will require diverse approaches and various collaborative efforts. The aim of this workshop is to raise awareness for the need to link structured and unstructured data, and encourage the research community to develop approaches to improve treatments and optimize patient health and safety.
Semantic Web Business: Lessons Learned from the Trenches
http://semanticarts.com/wasabi-2015-west/
The 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of Data (NLIWoD 2015)
While the amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) increases rapidly, it is still used mostly by semantic web experts. There are two main obstacles to making the billions of RDF triples already available accessible for common web users: the need to learn the query language SPARQL, and the need to know the schemas underlying the datasets. Approaches to ease the burden of formulating a query include graphical query interfaces, agent-based systems, and natural language interfaces. Amongst them, natural language interfaces are receiving an increasing interest due to its high expressive power and low cost for educational purposes. Recent progresses in speech recognition technologies, e.g. Siri, also demonstrate the usefulness of a natural language interface. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for answering questions over the web of data. The workshop will comprise short and long paper presentations, demo and poster presentations, and a panel of leading experts to discuss the state of the art in question answering over structured data.
4th International Workshop on Ordering and Reasoning (OrdRing 2015)
http://www.streamreasoning.
More and more applications require real-time processing of massive, dynamically generated, ordered data; where order is often an essential factor reflecting recency, proximity or relevance. Stream and rank-aware data management techniques are progressively providing reactive and reliable query answering over such massive datasets. Key to their success is the use of streaming algorithms that harness the natural or enforceable orders in the data. Semantic technologies can play a relevant role in this setting, exploiting their expressive power to integrate those highly dynamic sources. In the recent years, different work started to push order-related concepts in semantic technologies, such as Stream Reasoning and top-k ontological query answering. The workshop aims at bringing together this growing and very active community interested in integrating ordering with reasoning by using methods inspired by stream and rank-aware data management.
Diversity++
http://dase.cs.wright.
Semantic Web is becoming pervasive in new, unconventional application domains such as oceanography, astronomy, music, bioinformatics, healthcare etc. Interestingly, besides the Semantic Web theory and best practices, new and sometimes different trends can be found in the usage of Semantic Web principles and tools in these domains such as the adoption of specific patterns while exploiting Semantic technologies, the usage of additional conceptual modeling such as UML and Markov Chains. This workshop intends to offer a forum of discussion, for researchers and practitioners, concerning the exploitation of Semantic Web principles and tools in these new and unconventional domains. It aims at reaching a twofold objective: broadening the view and experience in the adoption of the Semantic Web principles and practice in different domains; offering the Semantic Web view, from people inside the community, to researchers and practitioners coming from different domains and interested in exploiting Semantic Web principles and practices.
Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW 2015)
Uncertainty is an unavoidable factor in knowledge interchange and application interoperability. Different applications have different ontologies, different semantics, and different knowledge and data stores. Legacy applications are usually only partially documented and may rely on tacit usage conventions that even proficient users do not fully understand or appreciate. Further, data that is exchanged in the context of the Semantic Web may be incomplete, inconsistent, and inaccurate. This suggests that recent work in the application of probability and decision theory to complex, open-world problems could be of vital importance to the success of the Semantic Web. Incorporating these new technologies into languages, protocols, and specifications is fundamental to bringing the Semantic Web vision to its full fruition.