News Story

Keynote at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Interoperation in Complex Information Ecosystems

John Domingue, Wednesday 19 Jun 2013

Today saw the end of the Dagstuhl Seminar on Interoperation in Complex Information Ecosystems. These seminars are prestigious events held at the Dagstuhl Castle in Germany which have to be booked two years in advance. The events last between three days to one week and cover new or emerging topics in Computer Science. Generally, the organisers will bring together the most prominent scientists in a number of fields so that they can discuss common problems and see how a combination of theories and techniques can lead to new insights in computing.

The above seminar tackled the problem of how complex ecosystems of information systems incorporating large amounts of data, a multitude of stakeholders, and a plethora of data sources and systems can be interoperate and be integrated. The attendees were composed of many of the world’s leading researchers in the area of the Semantic Web, databases, machine learning and RESTful services.

With the overall goal of creating a scientific roadmap for interoperation in complex ecosystems the Seminar was structured into four Keynotes, short position talks and eight breakout sessions. The four Keynotes comprised: Felix Naumann from the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Germany, on The Quality of Web Data, Sheila McIlraith from the University of Toronto in Canada on A Purposeful View of Data; Kai-Uwe Sattler from the Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany, on What’s wrong with Linked Data? And John Domingue of KMi, on Beyond SPARQL: Linked Data, Software, Services and Applications.

Following the event roadmap for the area is currently being synthesized by the organisers: Rudi Studer of KIT in Germany, Craig Knoblock of the University of Southern California and Kai-Uwe Sattler. Watch this space for more updates!