News Story

ESWC 2013

Peter Scott, Wednesday 5 Jun 2013

The ESWC 2013 conference, themed on "Semantics and Big Data", took place on May 26-30 in Montpellier, France, with important contributions from KMi. Professor Enrico Motta was invited as a keynote speaker and he opened the conference with a reflection of what being semantic really means. He presented Rexplore as an example of a KMi application that exploits semantics to better link and retrieve information about academic experts, topics, areas and publications. Additionally, Enrico was invited as part of the big data panel, where he highlighted the role of big data done by lots of small data journalists or citizens.

Professor John Domingue presence as chair of the steering committee and president of the STI international, was key to ensure the successful organisation and running of the event.

Other KMi-ers and Ex-KMi-ers were also present at the event. Vanesa Lopez and Miriam Fernandez co-organised the poster and demo session, where a high number of posters and applications generated really lively and interesting discussions. Mattew Rowe and Claudia Wagner presented two out of three papers in the social web and web science session were they highlighted the use of semantics to better understand the topical specificity of online communities as well as the wisdom of the social media audience.

The social event showed the influence of the Spanish culture in south France with a beautiful flamenco performance.