News Story

Extended Semantic Web Conference 20th Anniversary

Jane Whild, Friday 2 Jun 2023

The Semantic Web Community gathered in Crete for the 20th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023) to hear the latest results in research, technologies, and applications in its field. This is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. In addition to a technical program organized over numerous tracks, the five-day event featured workshops and tutorials, system descriptions and demos, a posters exhibition and a doctoral symposium.

As usual, there was a strong representation from KMi at this year’s event.

Professor John Domingue, President of STI International which runs the conference series, opened the PhD symposium with a keynote talk entitled “Spending as Much Time as Possible on the Beach: Reflections on an Academic Career”. John also chaired two special events:

The 20th Anniversary Panel featuring Dieter Fensel, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Ian Horrocks and Stefan Decker, who are some of the key players in establishing the field of Semantic Web. The Panel exchanged perspectives about the past and looked ahead to the future.
The annual STI International Board meeting which oversees the ESWC Conference series.

KMi members co-organised or participated in six workshops:

Aisling Third and John Domingue co-organised Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data (TrusDeKW). This was last of three distinct workshops to bring researchers together to discuss the problems of data centralisation and diverse approaches for decentralising data, such as federated querying and distributed ledgers. The workshop included two talks by KMi members: Ethics and Executability: Tracing Decency in Decentralised Knowledge Graph Applications, by Aisling Third and John Domingue and An Architecture for a Decentralised Learning Analytics Platform, by Audrey Ekuban and John Domingue.
Angelo Salatino presented his work on “Untangling Robots’ Cultural Norms” co-authored with Enrico Motta and Agnese Chiatti at the “2043 track: The next 20 years – ESWC 2043 papers.” This session featured presentations also from KMi alumni: Marta Sabou and Mathieu d’Aquin.
Francesco Osborne Co-Chaired the Semantic Technologies for Scientific, Technical, and Legal Data Workshop and Angelo Salatino sat on the Programme Committee.
Alba Morales Tirado Co-organised The 6th International Workshop on Semantic Web solutions for large-scale biomedical data analytics – SeWeBMeDA-2023
Francesco Osborne Co-chaired the Knowledge Graph Generation from Text – TEXT2KG Workshop. Also involved in the workshop organisation were Enrico Motta (Advisory Committee) and Angelo Salatino (Programme Committee).
At the Semantic Methods for Events and Stories Workshop (SEMMES) Alba Morales Tirado presented the paper Musical Meetups: a Knowledge Graph Approach for Historical Social Network Analysis which she co-authored with Jason Carvalho, Paul Mulholland and Enrico Daga. Their paper features the work carried as part of the MEETUPS pilot, which focuses on supporting music historians and teachers by providing a Web tool that enables the exploration and visualisation of encounters between people in the musical world in Europe from c.1800 to c.1945, relying on information. MEETUPS is one of the pilots developed as part of the Polifonia project.

John Domingue said: “It has been a privilege to collaborate with the Semantic Web community over the past two decades. It was exciting to contemplate what we may achieve together in the next twenty years”.

#ESWC2023

Publications:

Tirado, A., Carvalho, J., Mulholland, P. and Daga, E. (2023) Musical Meetups: a Knowledge Graph approach for Historical Social Network Analysis, Proceedings of the ESWC 2023 Workshops and Tutorials. Semantic Methods for Events and Stories (SEMMES), Hersonissos, Greece

Enrico Motta, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Agnese Chiatti (2023). Untangling Robots’ Cultural Norms. In ESWC 2043: The Next 20 Years Track at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023), Crete, June 2023.

Under this link, Springer has made the proceedings available open access for 4 weeks from 1st June.