Description

The Web of Data is messy. It contains billions of facts hosted by many different parties, represented using a variety of vocabularies with varying degrees of preciseness, and supplied in an inconsistent fashion. These are not deficiencies in the Web of Data, instead they are the core to the open world that allows providers to easily expose and connect their data. However, the messiness of the WoD is currently not taken advantage of. The Web of Data (WoD) is treaten as a database where precise queries can be formulated and answers are definitive. There is a need for the Semantic Web research community to focus on returning “good enough” answers.

The SOKS symposium is a two-days event discussing the relation between CI and KRR in the context of the Semantic Web. The goal is to bring together researchers working on CI, the Semantic Web and Complex Systems to highlight some of the currently happening cross-research and foster new opportunities of collaboration.

The Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI-AIABN), the Network Institute and the Netherlands research school for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) are generously sponsoring this event.

Invited speakers and tutorial chairs

Philippe Cudré-Mauroux is a postdoctoral scholar working in the Database Systems group at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, where he won both the Doctorate Award and the EPFL Press Mention in 2007 for his work on emergent semantics systems. Before joining MIT, Philippe worked on distributed information systems for HP, IBM T.J. Watson, and Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests are in large-scale infrastructures for non-relational data and in decentralized, bottom-up data integration techniques.
Kia Teymourian is a Research Assistant in the group of Networked Information Systems at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He worked in the European research project TripCom and the German national project Corporate Semantic Web. His current research activities are focused on large-scale semantic-enabled distributed information systems as well as nature inspired self-organization for semantic data management. He is currently working in the joint research project Digipolis on an implementation of a self-organized semantic storage service for massive metadata storage from a semantic-enabled indoor navigation system.
David Chavalarias is CNRS/ISCC researcher at the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology, (CREA - Ecole Polytechnique/CNRS). He studied mathematics and computer sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan and got a PhD in Cognitive Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) with a specialization in social systems modeling. His research interests are cultural evolution modeling, scientometry and social dynamics reconstruction from large corpora data mining. David Chavalarias is also vice-president secretary of the Complex Systems Society and co-director of the Paris IdF Complex System Institute
Siegfried Handschuh is a SFI Stokes Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) and research leader of the Semantic Collaboration team at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). Siegfried holds Honours Degrees in both Computer Science and Information Science and a PhD from the University of Karlsruhe. He published over 90 papers as books and journal, book chapters, conference, and workshop contributions, mainly in the areas of Annotation for the Semantic Web, Knowledge Acquisition and Social Semantic Collaboration.
Frank van Harmelen
Gusz Eiben

Schedule

The dates are the 28th and 29th of April 2010. The location is the VU University Amsterdam in Amsterdam. The schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, April 28th

12h30-13h00 HG-01A05	Registration
13h00-14h30 HG-01A05	Martijn Schut – Guszti Eiben Introduction to Evolutionary Computing and Situated Evolution (Slides) We discuss the notion of situated evolution. Our treatment includes positioning situated evolution on the map of evolutionary processes in terms of time- and space-embeddedness, and the identification of decentralization as an orthogonal property. We proceed with a selected overview of related literature in the categories of our interest. This overview enables us to distill further detailes that distinguish the encountered methods. As it turns out the essential differences can be captured through the mechanics of selection and fertilization. These insights are aggregated into a new model called the Situated Evolution Method, which is then used to provide a fine-grained map of exisiting work.
14h30-15h00 HG-01A05	Coffee break
15h00-16h30 HG-01A05	Frank van Harmelen Introduction to the Semantic Web
16h30-17h00 HG-01A05	Open discussion

Thursday, April 29th

09h00-09h30 Auditorium	Registration
09h30-10h30 Auditorium	David Chavalarias Data trails reconstruction at the community level in the Web of data (Video) Socio-semantic networks continuously produce data over the Web in a time consistent manner. From scientific communities publishing new findings in archives to citizens confronting their opinions in blogs, there is a real challenge to reconstruct, at the community level, the data trails they produce in order to have a global representation of the topics unfolding in these public arena. We will present such methods of reconstruction in the framework of co-word analysis, highlighting perspectives for the development of innovative tools for our daily interactions with their productions.
10h30-11h00 Boelelaanzijde	Coffee break
11h00-12h00 Auditorium	Siegfried Handschuh Social Semantic Collaboration with the Desktop (Slides,Video) The Social Semantic Desktop, defines a user's personal information environment as a source and end-point of the Semantic Web: Knowledge workers comprehensively express their information and data with respect to their own conceptualizations. This covers the aspects of social semantics and meta-data creation.
12h00-13h30 Boelelaanzijde	Lunch
13h30-14h30 Auditorium	Philippe Cudré-Mauroux Emergent Semantics (Slides,Video) Emergent semantics refers to a set of principles and techniques analyzing the evolution of decentralized semantic structures in large scale distributed information systems. Emergent semantics approaches model the semantics of a distributed system as an ensemble of relationships between syntactic structures. They consider both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics.
14h30-15h00 Boelelaanzijde	Coffee break
15h00-16h00 HG-04A00	Kia Teymourian Self-organization in Distributed Semantic Repositories (Slides,Video) Principles from nature-inspired selforganization can help to attack the massive scalability challenges in future internet infrastructures. We researched into ant-like mechanisms for clustering semantic information. We outline algorithms to store related information within clusters to facilitate efficient and scalable retrieval. At the core are similarity measures that cannot consider global information such as a completly shared ontology. Mechanisms for syntax-based URI-similarity and the usage of a dynamic partial view on an ontology for path-length based similarity are described and evaluated. We give an outlook on how to consider application specific relations for clustering with a usecase in geo-information systems.
16h00-16h30 HG-04A00	Open discussion
16h30-18h00 Boelelaanzijde	Reception

Organisers

Dr. Christophe Guéret
Dr. Stefan Schlobach
Dr. Martijn Schut

Localisation

The symposium will take place in the main building (“Hoofdgebouw”) of the VU Amsterdam at:

De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam

Click on the following link to get a map of the campus. Detailled information about how to get there by car or using the public transport network is available on the VU website


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