News Story

Fourth ESWC Summer School ‘Awesome’

John Domingue, Monday 8 Sep 2014

"It was an awesome experience."

"ESWC Summer School was awesome, seriously! I would not expect at all to meet so many cool people (tutors and students) there and learnt a lot from them. Thank you all tutors, students and whoever involved making this summer school happen. I would definitely recommend the ESWC Summer School to other students…."

"…. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the ESWC summer school organizers for such a fantastic event and the tutors to share their valuable time and experiences. I enjoyed the whole learning process with the experts and peers, along with the informal gatherings and discussions. I could not envision a better way of learning and connecting, and becoming a part of the Semantic Web community. I wish to stay in touch with all the awesome people I met here and wish them all the best for their future endeavors."

"Many thanks to all tutors for organizing the summer school in that place, in that way and for sharing with us a lot of their positive energy and knowledge. I ended the week with new friends and that is really invaluable. I don’t think that would have been possible in other summer schools, so just keep the secret formula.."

"Thanks to all the tutors and students for the knowledge, I really learned a lot, personally and professionally…"

"As a first summer school, really it was a great and enriched experience with awesome persons ! Thank you all tutors for sharing knowledge and being generous and thanks to all students and hope sincerely to see you all again."

The above represents just a small portion of the feedback we received from the attendees of the Fourth ESWC Summer School which was held last week in the beautiful village of Kalamaki in Southern Crete. The school has the aim of fostering a new generation of Semantic Web and Linked Data researchers through a combination of Keynotes, interactive hands-on sessions, poster sessions and a collaborative mini project. The core technical part of the School’s curriculum is based upon the results of the EUCLID project enabling us to provide rich interactive material to students before they attend.

The school is conducted in a relaxed atmosphere – we are for example actually able to teach outside due to the favourable climate – which results in the students engaging in a highly enthusiastic fashion. Keynotes this year included Marko Grobelnik from JSI, Avi Bernstein from ETH Zurich, Dominic Oldman from the British Museum and Guus Schreiber from the Free University of Amsterdam.

KMi’s involvement in the event comprises of providing a School Director (John Domingue), organisational support (Aneta Tumilowicz) and the school website (Damian Dadswell). We also used a portion of our emerging semantic sensor network platform developed within the context of our CARRE eHealth project.

Given the sustained success of the event we have now formalised the school’s governance through a Steering Committee which is comprised of number of leading institutions within the Semantic Web area, specifically: KIT, JSI, FORTH, STI International, the University of Southampton, the University of Innsbruck and KMi. We are already looking forward to next year’s event.