SEMANTiCS 2020 Open Access proceedings

This year’s SEMANTiCS conference was a weird one. As so many other conferences, we had to improvise to deal with the COVID-19 restrictions around travel and event organization. With the help of many people behind the scenes -including the wonderful program chairs Paul Groth and Eva Blomqvist- , we did have a relatively normal reviewing process for the Research and Innovation track. In the end, 8 papers were accepted for publication in this year’s proceedings. The authors were then asked to present their work in pre-recorded videos. These were shown in a very nice webinar, together with contributions from industry. All in all, we feel this downscaled version of Semantics was quite successful.

The Open Access proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS series and are now available at https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030598327

All presentation videos can be watched at https://2020-eu.semantics.cc/ (program/recordings->videos).

And stay tuned for announcements of SEMANTiCS 2021!!

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Semantics2019 trip report

Last week, I attended the SEMANTiCS2019 conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. This was the 15th edition of the conference that brings together Academia and Industry around the topic of Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Technologies and the good news was that this year’s conference was the biggest ever with 426 unique participants.

I was not able to join the workshop day or the dbpedia day on monday and thursday respectively, but was there for the main programme. The first day opened with a keynote from Oracle’s Michael J. Sullivan about Hybrid Knowledge Management Architecture and how Oracle is betting on Semantic Technology to work in combination with data lake architectures.

The 2nd keynote by Michel Dumontier of Maastricht University covered the principles of FAIR publishing of data and current avances in actually measuring FAIRness of datasets.

During one of the parallel sessions I attended the presentation of the eventual best paper winner Robin Keskisärkkä, Eva Blomqvist, Leili Lind, and Olaf Hartig. RSP-QL*: Enabling Statement-Level Annotations in RDF Streams . This was a very nice talk for a very nice and readable paper. The paper describes the combination of current RDF stream reasoning language RSP-QL and how it can be extended with the principles of RDF* that allow for statements about statements without traditional re-ification. The paper nicely mixes formal semantics, an elegant solution, working code, and a clear use case and evaluation. Congratulations to the winners.

Other winners included the best poster, which was won by our friends over at UvA.

The second day for me was taken up by the Special Track on Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities, which consisted of research papers, use case presentations and posters that relate to the use of Semantic technologies in this domain. The program was quite nice, as the embedded tweets below hopefully show.

All in all, this years edition of SEMANTICS was a great one, I hope next year will be even more interesting (I will be general chairing it).

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SEMANTiCS2017

This year, I was conference chair of the SEMANTiCS conference, which was held 11-14 Sept in Amsterdam. The conference was in my view a great success, with over 310 visitors across the four days, 24 parallel sessions including academic and industry talks, six keynotes, three awards, many workshops and lots of cups of coffee. I will be posting more looks back soon, but below is a storify item giving an idea of all the cool stuff that happened in the past week.

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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/

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