News Story

KMi at ESWC 2016!

Alessandro Adamou, Wednesday 8 Jun 2016

As with past editions of the Extended Semantic Web Conference, the Thirteenth edition (ESWC2016), once again held in Anissaras, Crete, featured a significant KMi delegation and a host of former KMi-ers. Five researchers – Prof. John Domingue, Alessandro Adamou, Carlo Allocca, Mathieu d’Aquin and Hassan Saif – attended as KMi delegates, and even more contributed from afar to the success of the conference.

Three items were presented by the KMi at the main conference:

Semantic Topic Compass – Classification based on Unsupervised Feature Ambiguity Gradation, by Amparo Elisabeth Cano, Hassan Saif, Harith Alani and Enrico Motta
SPARQL Query Recommendations by Example, by Carlo Allocca, Alessandro Adamou, Mathieu d’Aquin and Enrico Motta (demo)
SentiCircles: A Platform for Contextual and Conceptual Sentiment Analysis, by Hassan Saif, Maxim Bashevoy, Steve Taylor, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani (demo)

This edition of ESWC featured strong involvement of the KMi team in its organisation. STI International president and KMi director John Domingue chaired the STI International Board meeting and General Assembly and also the ESWC Organisational, Track Chairs and Steering Committee meetings. Mathieu d’Aquin served as one of the program chairs for this edition. Also worthy of note are the organisational roles of KMi alumni Stefan Dietze and Vanessa Lopez, who respectively co-chaired the ESWC Challenges and the Smart Cities, Urban and Geospatial Data research track.

KMi and its legacy were also very active in ensuring the success of pre-conference events. John Domingue gave a keynote talk titled Blockchains: A New Platform for Semantically Enabled Transactions at this year’s edition of the SALAD Workshop on Services and Applications over Linked APIs and Data (co-organised by KMi alumna Maria Maleshkova). Hassan Saif gave a keynote talk titled Sentiment Analysis in Social Streams, the Role of Context and Semantics at the Semantic Sentiment Analysis Workshop. This year was also the breakthrough of a dedicated Digital Humanities event at ESWC, in the form of the WHiSe workshop. The workshop was organised by KMi-ers Alessandro Adamou and Enrico Daga with University of Lancaster lecturer Leif Isaksen, and featured a multi-disciplinary program committee that included Open University researchers Carlo Allocca, Paul Mulholland, Ilaria Tiddi, Elton Barker, Francesca Benatti and Angeliki Lymberopoulou. It was very well-received thanks to its dual format, accommodating both presentations of peer-reviewed papers and round table open discussions, and was the second ESWC workshop in number of submissions and accepted papers. Also, Mathieu d’Aquin was among the mentors at the PhD symposium which took place before the main conference. Finally, the PROFILES Workshop on dataset profiling and federated search, once again co-organised by Stefan Dietze, had its third edition at ESWC.