KMi Seminars
Semantic annotation and Semantic search in Cultural Heritage.
This event took place on Wednesday 17 December 2008 at 11:30

 
Michiel Hildebrand Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam

In our research we investigate to what extent explicit semantics can be used to support end users with the exploration of large heterogeneous collections. In particular we consider cultural heritage, a knowledge-rich domain in which collections are typically described by multiple thesauri. We focus on three types of end user functionality.


First, searching for terms within multiple thesauri to support manual annotation. Second, keyword search, as it has become the de-facto standard to access data on the web. Third, faceted browsing as it has become a popular method to interactively explore (image) collections.


For these three tasks we question the role of explicit semantics in the search algorithm, the result organization and visualization and how to evaluate the added value of for end users. We investigate these questions by the implementation and evaluation of prototype systems on top of large and real wold data collections.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.