News Story

Congratulations to Sofia, Laurian and Vlad!

John Domingue, Tuesday 17 Jul 2007

Congratulations to Sofia Angeletou, Laurian Gridinoc, and Vlad Tanasescu, all Ph.D. students in KMi for winning prizes for their mini projects at this year’s Semantic Web Summer school held last week in Cercedilla, Spain. At the summer school 50 of the best Semantic Web Ph.D. students from across the world carry out projects over the week in groups of 4 or 5 individuals, and at the end of the week each group presents their work which is then judged by the tutors and organising committee. Vlad’s group won their prize for a highly original presentation on how highly collaborative tagging system could provide emergent semantics through the “tagging of tags”. Sofia and Laurian’s group was awarded first prize for their project on a cultural recommendation system which would advise tourists on the cultural norms and taboos for holiday destinations. In addition to creating ontologies to represent cultural norms the group also investigated how one might carry out compliance checking between a visitor and a destination as, for example, advice for an English tourist would differ from advice to an Indian tourist visiting Colombia. Both groups contained members from a range of institutes from across the world and both groups have plans to carry on the work. Congratulations!