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KMi Seminars
Interpreting Linked Data as ontologies: doctrines and creeping issues
This event took place on Wednesday 15 May 2013 at 11:30

Dr. Alessandro Adamou The Open University


Years of advancements in the Semantic Web are determining a technological gap between the Linked Data levels of the traditional Semantic Web vision, and its higher layers. While the core knowledge representation and interlinking mechanisms have consolidated rather rapidly, standardisation efforts for reasoning, unifying logics, proofing and interaction are striving to reach maturity. This has given rise to alternative schools of thought concerning the nature of the Semantic Web infrastructure, some of which are even putting the very need for ontology languages in question. Part of this phenomenon is due to unexpected results in interpreting combined Linked Data along with their schemas, alignments and other ontologies, with subsequent declining trust in high-level semantics from application developers. This talk will explore some possible research directions that can help keep ontology management on track with the evolution of Linked Data. One such effort will be described in greater detail, which proposes virtualisation as a technique for dynamically assembling multiple semantic data sources into makeshift ontology networks. Experiments on the interpretation of virtual ontology networks have shown promising results in several recurring distribution scenarios of Linked Data statements, with the highest possible axiom expressivity being reached with a reduced assembly effort.



 
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.