E-mail

Vrije Universiteit Address
Web & Media Group < Computer Science < Faculty of Sciences < Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1081A, 1081HV Amsterdam, Room U349
T 020-5987751, F 020-5987653

General Information

I am a Postdoctoral researcher with Guus Schreiber in the Web & Media group at the VU. I do research on information integration and geospatial semantics in the Poseidon project.

My curriculum vitæ from 1997 to 2009. My PhD thesis about ontology alignment is available here: “Evaluating Ontology-Alignment Techniques” and my MSc thesis about the border between ontology engineering and information retrieval is available here: “Living on the Edge”.

Research

My research mainly deals with Information Integration and Reasoning.

Computer science topics that occupy me are: Ontology Alignment, Integrating Spatial reasoning and Semantics, Trust on the Web, Data Mining, specifically mining knowledge from the World Wide Web, The Semantic Web, Description Logic, combining Logical and Statistical reasoning, Information Retrieval & Extraction.

Some other topics that interest me are: Information Theory, Program Algebra, Logical & Functional programming languages.

Program Committees

I have reviewed papers for the Journal of Web Semantics and Information Systems; and for the following conferences, workshops, and summer schools: FOIS 2010, KCAP 2005-2009, ISWC 2009, ISWC 2009 Doctoral Consortium, ESWC 2009, ICSD 2009, ECAI 2009, SemEval 2009 workshop (at ACM 2009), ESSLLI 2006, ASWC 2006.

the SWI-Prolog space package

I am working on a Prolog library for spatial indexing called the space package. It provides fast nearest neighbor, intersection, and containment queries. The current version can deal with Points, LineStrings, and Polygons as query shapes or as data shapes. Results are “returned” one by one, non-deterministically. This makes writing combined spatial/semantic/temporal query optimizers in Prolog relatively easy. The space package also provides back and forth conversion between a number of geospatial/geosemantic standards, like: GML, KML, WKT, and RDF with GeoRSS Simple and GeoRSS GML or with WGS84 properties.

You can find more about the space package in the workshop article The Space package: Tight Integration Between Space and Semantics. The source code of the space package can be downloaded from or browsed on the GIT repository. Documentation can be found in the SWI-Prolog documentation server.

Space package visualization of RDF about the VU from GeoNames

This is a visualization of the location of the VU, loaded dynamically from GeoNames RDF with the space package, served from a little KML server, and sent to Google Maps to display embedded in this webpage. The interesting part of this is that the KML server that does the brokering can be written in about 10 lines of Prolog code and supports RDFS and spatial reasoning. See the KML server source code.


View Larger Map
Enter place name:

The diagram below shows how the map is constructed by nested calls that gather and process the geolocation of the VU. This entire process is encoded in a single URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl:8787/space.kml?url=http://ws.geonames.org/search?type=rdf&q=Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which is processed piece by piece by the various HTTP servers.

the Simple Event Model

Together with Véronique Malaisé I designed the Simple Event Model (SEM), an ontology to describe events in terms of “who did what with what to whom, where and when?”, respectively modeled as Actors, Events, Objects, Roles, and Places, which are all Time-stamped. Mappings from SEM to other models can be found on the SEM extensions webpage. An updated version is due in the near future.

Publications

This table is sortable, click the headers. My favorites are marked with a .

title	authors	in	year
The Space package: Tight Integration Between Space and Semantics (extended version)	van Hage, W. R. Wielemaker, J. Schreiber, A. Th.	Transactions in GIS (journal)	2009 (to appear)
The Space package: Tight Integration Between Space and Semantics	van Hage, W. R. Wielemaker, J. Schreiber, A. Th.	TerraCognita 2009 (workshop)	2009
Spatial and Semantic Reasoning to Recognize Ship Behavior (draft)	van Hage, W. R. Malaisé, V. de Vries, G. Schreiber, A. Th. van Someren, M.	ISWC 2009 (demo & poster)	2009
Combining Ship Trajectories and Semantics with the Simple Event Model (SEM)	van Hage, W. R. Malaisé, V. de Vries, G. Schreiber, A. Th. van Someren, M.	ACM EiMM09 (workshop)	2009
Structuring and extracting knowledge for the support of hypothesis generation in molecular biology	Roos, M. et al.	BMC Bioinformatics (journal) vol. 10, nr. 10	2009 (october)
Semantic disclosure in an e-Science environment	Marshall, M. S. et al.	Semantic e-Science (book chapter) Springer AoIS	2009
The OAEI food task: an analysis of a thesaurus alignment task	van Hage, W. R. Sini, M. Finch, L. Kolb, H. P. Schreiber, A. Th.	Applied Ontology (journal)	2009 (to appear)
Evaluating Ontology-Alignment Techniques	van Hage, W. R.	PhD thesis	2008
Biological applications of AIDA knowledge management components (poster abstract)	Roos, M. et al.	ISMB 2008 (poster)	2008
Relevance-based Evaluation of Alignment Approaches: The OAEI 2007 Food Task Revisited (poster version)	van Hage, W. R. Kolb, H. P. Schreiber, A. Th.	OM 2008 (workshop)	2008
Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain	Lauser, B. Johannsen, G. Caracciolo, C. Keizer, J. van Hage, W. R. Mayr, P.	DC 2008 (conference)	2008
De AIDA toolbox: Een gecombineerde aanpak voor het beheren van kennis	Marshall, M. S. Roos, M. Meij, E. Katrenko, S. van Hage, W. R. Adriaans, P. W.	Agroinformatica 21:4 (journal, short)	2008
My first BioAID: heuristic support for hypothesis construction (conference paper unavailable) (poster abstract)	Roos, M. Katrenko, S. van Hage, W. R. Meij, E. Marshall, M. S. Adriaans, P. W.	ISMB-ECCB 2007 (conference)	2007
Sample Evaluation of Ontology-Matching Systems	van Hage, W. R. Isaac, A. Aleksovski, Z.	EON 2007 (workshop)	2007
A Survey and Categorization of Ontology-Matching Use Cases (poster version)	Aleksovski, Z. van Hage, W. R. Isaac, A.	OM 2007 (workshop)	2007
Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2007	Euzenat, J. et al.	OM 2007 (report)	2007
D2.2.9: Description of alignment evaluation and benchmarking results	Shvaiko, P. et al.	Deliverable of the Knowledge Web working group on heterogeneity (2.2)	2007
UVAVU: WordNet Similarity and Lexical Patterns for Semantic Relation Classification (poster version) see also: Classification of semantic relations between nominals, Language Resources and Evaluation 43 (2), Girju, R. et al.	van Hage, W. R. Katrenko, S.	SemEval-2007 (workshop)	2007
Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2006	Euzenat, J. et al.	OM 2006 (report)	2006
A Method for Learning Part-Whole Relations	van Hage, W. R. Kolb, H. P. Schreiber, A. Th.	ISWC 2006 (conference)	2006
D2.2.4: Alignment implementation and benchmarking results	Stuckenschmidt, H. et al.	Deliverable of the Knowledge Web working group on heterogeneity (2.2)	2006
A Method to Combine Linguistic Ontology-Mapping Techniques	van Hage, W. R. Katrenko, S. Schreiber, A. Th.	ISWC 2005 (conference)	2005
Information Retrieval Support for Ontology Construction and Use	van Hage, W. R. de Rijke, M. Marx, M.	ISWC 2004 (conference)	2004
“Living on the edge”, Combining structured & semi-structured data for information retrieval	van Hage, W. R.	MSc thesis	2004
The University of Amsterdam at CLEF 2004	Fissaha, S. van Hage, W. R. Kamps, J. Lacerda de Melo, G. de Rijke, M.	CLEF 2004 (conference)	2004
Towards a Topic Driven Access to Full Text Documents	Caracciolo, C. van Hage, W. R. de Rijke, M.	ECDL 2004 (conference)	2004

Teaching etc.

I am involved with the following courses at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam:

• Ontology Engineering for MSc students in Informatics, Information Sciences, and Artificial Intelligence. This course treats topics like modeling decisions, ontological commitment, and design patterns in RDF(S), OWL, UML.
• Information Retrieval for MSc students in Informatics, Information Sciences, and Artificial Intelligence. This course is about topics such as crawling, indexing, various term weighting schemes, and evaluation.

Projects and Networks

• Poseidon 2008-now: Currently, I do research on geospatial reasoning in the maritime domain within the Poseidon project.
  
  Within Poseidon I work on the SWI-Prolog space package, which provides (geo)spatial indexing for Prolog. This allows fast nearest neighbor, intersection, and containment queries, aswell as conversion between common geospatial standards.
  
  In 2009 Véronique Malaisé and I set up the Simple Event Model (SEM) for describing events in Poseidon and other projects at the Web & Media group, like CHIP and AGORA.
  
  Within the Poseidon project I contribute to the following open source software projects: YSR, reasoner for SWI-Prolog, a forward chaining OWL Horst fragment reasoner; spatialindex, a C++ library containing various data structures for spatial indexing; SWI-Prolog's C++ interface; and the LinkedGeoData RDF rendering of OpenStreetMap shapes.

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• Knowledge Web & OAEI 2006 and OAEI 2007: Within the heterogeneity working group (2.2) of Knowledge Web (FP6-507482) I co-organized the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2006 and 2007. A full report about this can be found in my PhD thesis.
  
  In 2007 I organized the Food Thesaurus Alignment Task and the Environmental Thesaurus Alignment Task at the OAEI 2007 in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the National Agricultural Library of the United States Department of Agriculture
  More information about the tasks can be found on the Food and Environment Thesaurus Alignment Task 2007 website. (OAEI 2007 food & environment presentation)
  A report can be found in: “Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2007, Euzenat, J., A. Isaac, C. Meilicke, P. Shvaiko, H. Stuckenschmidt, O. Šváb, V. Svátek, van Hage, W. R., M. Yatskevich”
  
  In 2006 I organized the Thesaurus Alignment Task at the OAEI 2006.
  More information about the task can be found on the Thesaurus Alignment Task 2006 website. (OAEI 2006 food presentation)
  A report can be found in: “Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2006, Euzenat, J., M. Mochol, P. Shvaiko, H. Stuckenschmidt, O. Šváb, V. Svátek, van Hage, W. R., M. Yatskevich”
  

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• Virtual Laboratories for e-Science (VL-e) 2004-2008: Within the Adaptive Information Disclosure (AID, SP2.2) working group of VL-e I worked on web services for ontology mapping and knowledge discovery. Some practical working notes about handling meta-data can be found on the AID group's note page.

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• TNO projects I participated in 2004-2008: VL-e, Augmented Multi-media Interaction (AMI), Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS), Operation room of the near future (OKTO).

Martial Arts

I am a first-degree black belt jiu-jitsu. (shodan, 初段 柔術) I used to practice at the dojo of the USC in Amsterdam with grandmaster Edwin Hiense I have a green belt judo (third kyu, 三級 柔道) with master Eric Bos from when he still taught at the USC. Currently I practice shotokan karate (松濤館流 空手) at the SKCA.

Bass guitar

I play bass guitar in the (for lack of a better name for the genre) dutch progressive-death-metal-reggae-funk-rock band Gemeengoed.

Computer Generated Art

Below is a gallery of computer generated pictures I made between 1997 and 2001. They were all made using Adobe Photoshop's “Filters” menu and nothing else. (i.e. no paint brushes etc.)

Paradox of Choice

I agree with Barry Schwartz: More choice in our everyday life leads to less happiness.