Jacopo Urbani

About me

I am a PhD student in Distributed Systems and Semantic Web at the Vrije Universiteit. My current research focuses on large scale reasoning in the Semantic Web. More specifically I am looking in how to distribute the reasoning process (and in general all the other related intesive tasks) across many computers to be able to handle data on a web scale.

I am also interested in other problems derived by using data crawled from the web. Some of these problems concern trust, privacy and data quality.

Projects

During my research, I have developed some projects which I describe below. Click on the names to get more information about them.

Brief bio

I was born in Italy in 1984. I have studied Computer Science since my secondary school. I obtained my Bachelor at the University of Venice in February 2007 with a final score of 110/110 cum laude.

After I moved to Amsterdam and I obtained cum laude a Master in Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit in September 2009 with an average of 9/10.

In October 2009 I started a PhD at the Vrije Universiteit under the supervision of Henri Bal and Frank van Harmelen.

Contacts

Feel free to contact me at j DOT my surname AT few DOT vu DOT nl. If you want more information about me you can also visit my (not so often updated) personal website.

Awards

I was extremely honored to receive the following awards:

  • The paper "Scalable and parallel reasoning in the Semantic Web" received the best student paper award at ESWC 2010
  • The work "WebPIE: a Web-scale parallel inference engine" has won the IEEE SCALE 2010 challenge at CCGrid 2010
  • The paper "Scalable Distributed Reasoning using MapReduce" has received an honorable mention at ISWC 2009

Publications

Urbani J., Kotoulas, S., Maassen J., van Harmelen, F. & Bal, H. (2011), WebPIE: A Web-scale parallel inference engine using MapReduce, In Journal of Web Semantics (to appear).
Harth, A., Hogan, A., Kotoulas, S., Urbani J. (2011), Scalable integration and processing of linked data, In Proceedings of WWW '11 (Tutorial).
Kotoulas, S., Urbani, J. (2010), SPARQL Query Answering on a Shared-Nothing Architecture, In Proceedings of the SemData Workshop at VLDB '10. [DOWNLOAD]
Seinstra, F.J., Maassen, J., Nieuwpoort van, R.V., Drost, N., Kessel van, T., Werkhoven van, B., Urbani J., Jacobs C., Kielmann, T. & Bal, H. (2010), Jungle Computing: Distributed Supercomputing beyond Clusters, Grids, and Clouds, In M. Cafaro and G. Aloisio, editors, Grids, Clouds and Virtualization, Springer-Verlag '10. [DOWNLOAD]
Urbani J., Maaseen J., & Bal, H. (2010), Massive Semantic Web data compression with MapReduce, In Proceedings of the MapReduce workshop at HPDC '10. [DOWNLOAD]
Urbani J., Kotoulas, S., Maaseen J., van Harmelen, F. & Bal, H. (2010), OWL reasoning with WebPIE: calculating the closure of 100 billion triples, In Proceedings of the ESWC '10. [DOWNLOAD]
Urbani, J. (2010), Scalable and parallel reasoning in the Semantic Web, In Proceedings of the PhD symposium at the ESWC '10. [DOWNLOAD]
Li, P., Zeng, Y., Kotoulas, S., Urbani, J. & Zhong, N. (2009), "The Quest for Parallel Semantic Web Reasoning", In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Active Media Technology, LNCS. [DOWNLOAD]
Urbani, J., Kotoulas, S., Oren, E. & van Harmelen, F. (2009), "Scalable Distributed Reasoning using MapReduce", In Proceedings of the ISWC '09. [DOWNLOAD]
Urbani J. (2009), RDFS/OWL reasoning using the MapReduce framework, Master thesis, Vrije Universiteit [DOWNLOAD]