I am an assistant professor (UD) at the Web & Media group at the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). I am also a senior research fellow at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. In my research, I combine (Semantic) Web technologies with Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction to tackle research challenges in various domains. These include Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development (ICT4D). More information on these projects can be found on this site or through my CV .
Kickoff meeting Mixed Methods in the Humanities projects
Last week, the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded “Mixed Methods’ in the Humanities?” programme had its kickoff meeting for all funded projects in in Hannover, Germany. Our ArchiMediaL project on enriching and linking historical architectural and urban image collections was one of the projects funded through this programme and even though our project will only start in September, we already presented our approach, the challenges we will be facing and who will face them (our great team of post-docs Tino Mager, Seyran Khademi and Ronald Siebes). 
Other interesting projects included analysing of multi-religious spaces on the Medieval World (“Dhimmis and Muslims”); the “From Bach to Beatles” project on representing music and schemata to support musicological scholarship as well as the nice Digital Plato project which uses NLP technologies to map paraphrasing of Plato in the ancient world. An overarching theme was a discussion on the role of digital / quantitative / distant reading methods in humanities research. The projects will run for three years so we have some time to say some sensible things about this in 2020.
EVENTS2017 workshop at SEMANTiCS
An important role in the interpretation of cultural heritage collections is played by ‘historic events’. In the SEMANTiCS workshop Events2017: Understanding Events Semantics in Cultural Heritage, to be held on 11 Sept 2017, we will investigate and discuss challenges around identifying, representing, linking and reasoning about historical events. We invite full papers (8p) as well as short papers (4p) on this topic.
The call for papers is out now. You have until July 10, 2017 to submite your contribution. Contributions can include original research papers, position papers, or papers describing tools, demonstrators or datasets. Accepted contributions will be published on the CEUR-WS website (or equivalent).
More information at https://events2017workshop.wordpress.com/
ICT4D at Sustainability day
During the National Day for Sustainability (Nationale dag voor duurzaamheid in het hoger onderwijs 2017), the ICT4D team presented our current research and educational activities to the many participants of this event, hosted at VU. Anna Bon and myself presented our work on sustainable methodologies for ICT4D as well as current work on small and sustainable ICT platform (Kasadaka), see the slides below.
After this, the participants got a chance to meet our students and their very nice projects up close in an interactive demonstration session. Selected ICT4D students presented the voice-accessible services.
All photos by SURFSara, more pictures of the event can be found on Flickr.
VU’s 4th ICT4D symposium: a look back
Yesterday, 18 May 2017, the 4th International ICT4D symposium was held at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The event was organized by the W4RA team and supported by VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, VU Computer Science Department and VU International Office. Invited speakers from Ghana, France and the Netherlands highlighted this year’s theme was “Sustainability and ICT4D”.
Keynote speaker Gayo Diallo from Universite de Bordeaux discussed the possibilities of ICT for African Traditional Medicine (ATM). In his talk, he showed how semantic web technologies can play a role here to connect heterogeneous datasets for analytics and end-user services. Such services would need to be based on voice-interaction and localized technologies. His slides can be found here.
Chris van Aart from 2Coolmonkeys discussed a number of smartphone applications developed in the context of W4RA activities, including Mr. Jiri a tree-counting application. He proved there is a market for such applications in the African context (Slides).
After the break, Francis Dittoh from UDS Ghana discussed issues around sustainbility for a meteo application he is currently developing for Northern-Ghana (slides). Wendelien Tuijp from VU’s CIS then presented multiple perspectives on ICT4D (Slides). The symposium was closed by a video presentation from Aske Robenhagen, showcasing the ongoing work in Nepal around mapping knowledge networks and developing a smartphone application supporting information exchange for local accountability extension workers. More information on that project can be found at nepalnetworks.org/
The presentations of the day can be found through the links above. The entire symposium was live-streamed and you can watch it all on youtube or below.
Below is a lost of the approximate starting time of the various speakers in the video
- 6m19 Dr. Gayo Diallo – Université de Bordeaux (FR): Towards a Digital African Traditional Healthcare using Semantic Web.
- 56m28 Dr. Chris van Aart – 2CoolMonkeys BV (NL) : Developing Smartphone Apps for African farmers.
- 1h30m00 break.
- 1h52m00 Francis Dittoh – University for Development Studies (Ghana): ICT business development in rural Africa.
- 2h23m00 Wendelien Tuyp – CIS-VU : Sustainable Community Initiatives and African Farmer Innovation.
- 2h52m00 Aske Robenhagen Network Institute Academy Assistant VU – Building resilient applications for sustainable development. Better video of this can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hzRSo4TJtA
Big Data Europe Platform paper at ICWE 2017
With the launch of the Big Data Europe platform behind us, we are telling the world about our nice platform and the many pilots in the societal challenge domains that we have executed and evaluated. We wrote everything down in one comprehensive paper which was accepted at the 7th international conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2017) which is to be held in Rome next month.
The paper “The BigDataEurope Platform – Supporting the Variety Dimension of Big Data” is co-written by a very large team (see below) and it presents the BDE platform — an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use and adaptable (cluster-based and standalone) platform for the execution of big data components and tools like Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Flume and Cassandra. To facilitate the processing of heterogeneous data, a particular innovation of the platform is the Semantic Layer, which allows to directly process RDF data and to map and transform arbitrary data into RDF. The platform is based upon requirements gathered from seven of the societal challenges put forward by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 programme and targeted by the BigDataEurope pilots. It is validated through pilot applications in each of these seven domains. .A draft version of the paper can be found here.
The full reference is:
Sören Auer, Simon Scerri, Aad Versteden, Erika Pauwels, Angelos Charalambidis, Stasinos Konstantopoulos, Jens Lehmann, Hajira Jabeen, Ivan Ermilov, Gezim Sejdiu, Andreas Ikonomopoulos, Spyros Andronopoulos, Mandy Vlachogiannis, Charalambos Pappas, Athanasios Davettas, Iraklis A. Klampanos, Efstathios Grigoropoulos, Vangelis Karkaletsis, Victor de Boer, Ronald Siebes, Mohamed Nadjib Mami, Sergio Albani, Michele Lazzarini, Paulo Nunes, Emanuele Angiuli, Nikiforos Pittaras, George Giannakopoulos, Giorgos Argyriou, George Stamoulis, George Papadakis, Manolis Koubarakis, Pythagoras Karampiperis, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Maria-Esther Vidal. . Proceedings of The International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE), ICWE2017, LNCS, Springer, 2017
Dutch Ships and Sailors SPARQL handson exercises
I made some exercises a while ago but keep re-using them for SPARQL tutorials and hands on sessions. I now moved them to a new webpage. This page presents SPARQL queries in increasing complexity that one can copy-paste into the interactive query field of the Dutch Ships and Sailors live triple store.
Have fun with these Handson SPARQL excercises (updated May 2017)
Below you can also find the slides I used this tuesday for a workshop around Linked Data, Dutch Ships and Sailors and SPARQL, which form the introduction to the handson session.
[Reading club] Dance in the World of Data and Objects
This is a first post in a new series on VU Semantic Web reading club. During this weekly reading club we discuss a research paper related to Semantic Web, Human Computation or Computer Science in general. Every week, one group member selects and prepares a paper to discuss. This week it was my time and I chose a paper from 2013: “Dance in the World of Data and Objects” by Katerina El Raheb and Yannis Ioannidis (full citation and abstract below). The paper presents the need for (OWL) ontologies for dance representation. A quite nice slide deck supporting the paper is found here.
Computer-interpretable knowledge representations for dance is something I have been thinking about for a while now. I am mostly interested in representations that actually match the conceptual level at which dancers and choreoraphers communicate and how these are related to low-level representations such as Labanotation. I am currently supervising two Msc students on this topic.
The paper by El Raheb a
nd Ioannidis and our discussion afterwards outlined the potential use of such a formal representations for:
- Archiving dance and for retrieval. This is a more ‘traditional’ use of such representations in ICT for Cultural Heritage. An interesting effect of having this represented using standard semantic web languages is that we can connect deep representations of choreographers to highly heterogeneous knowledge about for example dance or musical styles, locations, recordings, emotions etc. An interesting direct connection could be to Albert Merono’s RDF midi representations.
- For dance analysis. By having large amounts of data in this representation, we can support Digital Humanities research. Both in more distant reading, but potentially also more close analysis of dance. Machine learning techniques could be of use herer.
- For creative support. Potentially very interesting is to investigate to what extent representations of dance can be used to support the creative process of dancers and choreographers. We can think of pattern-based adaptations of choreographies.
Citation: El Raheb K., Ioannidis Y. (2013) Dance in the World of Data and Objects. In: Nesi P., Santucci R. (eds) Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access, and Entertainment. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7990. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the challenges that we have faced and the solutions we have identified so far in our currently on-going effort to design and develop a Dance Information System for archiving traditional dance, one of the most significant realms of intangible cultural heritage. Our approach is based on Description Logics and aims at representing dance moves in a way that is both machine readable and human understandable to support semantic search and movement analysis. For this purpose, we are inspired by similar efforts on other cultural heritage artifacts and propose to use an ontology on dance moves (DanceOWL) that is based on the Labanotation concepts. We are thus able to represent dance movement as a synthesis of structures and sequences at different levels of conceptual abstraction, which serve the needs of different potential users, e.g., dance analysts, cultural anthropologists. We explain the rationale of this methodology, taking into account the state of the art and comparing it with similar efforts that are also in progress, outlining the similarities and differences in our respective objectives and perspectives. Finally, we describe the status of our effort and discuss the steps we intend to take next as we proceed towards the original goal.
DIVE+ Submitted to LODLAM
Here’s the submission to the annual LODLAM challenge from the DIVE+ team. In this video, we introduce the ideas behind DIVE+ and take you for a exploratory swim in the linked media knowledge graph!
Web and Media at ICT.OPEN2017
On 21 and 22 March, researchers from VU’s Web and Media group attended ICT.OPEN, the principal ICT research conference in the Netherlands. Here over 500 scientists from all ICT research disciplines & interested researchers from industry come together to learn from each other, share ideas and network. The conference featured some great keynote speeches, including one from Nissan’s Erik Vinkhuyzen on the role of anthropological and sociological research to develop better self-driving cars. Barbara Terhal from Aachen University gave a challenging, but well-presented talk on the challenges regarding robustness for quantum computing.
As last year, the Web and Media group this year was well represented through multiple oral presentations with accompanying posters and demonstrations :
- Oana Inel, Carlos Martinez and Victor de Boer presented DIVEplus. Oana did such a good job presenting the project in the main programme (see Oana’s DIVE+@ICTOpen2017 slides), through the demo and in front of a poster that the poster was selected as best Poster in the SIKS track.
- Benjamin Timmermans, Tobias Kuhn and Tibor Vermeij presented the Controcurator project with a demonstration and poster presentation. In the demo the ControCurator human-machine framework for identifying controversy in multimodal data is shown.
- Tobias Kuhn discussed “Genuine Semantic Publishing” in the Computer Science track on the first day. His slides can be found here. After the talk there was a very interesting discussion about the role of the narrative writing process and how it would relate to semantic publishing.
- Ronald Siebes and Victor de Boer then discussed how Big and Linked Data technologies developed in the Big Data Europe project are used to deliver pharmacological web-services for drug discovery. You can read more in Ronald’s blog post.
- Benjamin Timmermans and Zoltan Zslavik also presented the CrowdTruth demonstrator, which is shown in this short demonstrator video.
- Sabrina Sauer presented the MediaNow project with a nice poster titled MediaNow – using a living lab method to understand media professionals’ exploratory search.
Yay, congrats @oana_inel for this well deserved prize and nomination (and DIVE team) #ictopen2017 pic.twitter.com/UULeW3bqxQ
— Victor de Boer (@victordeboer) March 21, 2017
Hands on BDE Health at ICT.OPEN 2017
[This post was written by Ronald Siebes and crossposted at big-data-europe.eu and wm.cs.vu.nl]
Last week, BigDataEurope was present at the principal ICT research conference in the Netherlands, ICT.OPEN, where over 500 scientists from all ICT research disciplines & interested researchers from industry come together to learn from each other, share ideas and network.
This is the first time that the NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, added the “Health” track, a recognition of the increased importance of ICT in the domain of diagnosis, drug discovery and health-care. We presented a short paper written by Ronald Siebes, Victor de Boer, Bryn Williams-Jones, Kiera McNeice and Stian Soiland-Reyes covering the current state of the SC1 “Health, demographic change and well-being” pilot which implements the Open PHACTS functionality on the Big Data Europe infrastructure.
We succeeded to demonstrate the ease of use and practical value of the SC1 pilot for researchers in the domain of Drug Discovery and developers of Big Linked Data solutions and are looking forward to further strengthen our collaboration with the various. The paper was accepted as a poster presentation but also selected for an oral presentation at the “Health & ICT” track.
