Alumni Member
Vanessa Lopez (Alumni) 
Research Fellow
I was a research associate at KMi starting from 2003. My research was a key contribution towards an on-going effort in the lab to build a new generation of applications and tools that exploit the large scale and distributed semantic information available online. In particular, my research line was related to explore, develop and evaluate novel forms of Natural Language questions answering, able to take advantage and cope both with the huge number of structured data available on the Semantic Web and also with their extreme heterogeneity. As well as, to devise novel forms to exploit the combination of information spaces provided by the Semantic Web and by the (non-semantic) WWW and enhance traditional keyword-search technologies.
During my stay at KMi, I participated in several European projects (Dot.Kom, AKT, OpenKnowledge, Xmedia, SmartProducts) and I was the project champion and main developer of AquaLog and PowerAqua, a pioneer systems in Natural Language interfaces for the Semantic Web. PowerAqua is the first implemented question answering system that combines and aggregates semantic information, publicly available on the Web, to interpret and answer user queries pose in Natural language on the fly.
Keys: Question answering, Ontology mapping and fusion, Knowledge management, Semantic Web, designing and implementing new technology, Java developer
Projects
Technologies
News
Publications
Lopez, V., Fernández, M., Motta, E. and Stieler, N. (2011). PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the semantic web. Semantic Web, 3(3), pp. 249–265. https://oro.open.ac.uk/32164/.
Lopez, V., Uren, V., Sabou, M. and Motta, E. (2011). Is question answering fit for the Semantic Web? A survey. Semantic Web, 2(2), pp. 125–155. https://oro.open.ac.uk/29573/.
Fernandez, M., Zhang, Z., Lopez, V., Uren, V. and Motta, E. (2011). Ontology augmentation: combining semantic web and text resources. In: 6th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2011), 25-29 Jun 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada. https://oro.open.ac.uk/29125/.
Lopez, V. and Motta, E. (2005). PowerAqua: an ontology question answering system for the Semantic Web. In: 11th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA 2005), 16-18 Nov 2005, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23672/.
Lopez, V., Fernandez, M., Motta, E., Sabou, M. and Uren, V. (2007). Question Answering on the Real Semantic Web. In: The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), 11-15 Nov 2007, Busan, Korea. https://oro.open.ac.uk/28512/.
Lopez, V., Motta, E. and Uren, V. (2006). AquaLog: an ontology-driven question answering system to interface the semantic web. In: HLT-NAACL 2006 - Demo session, 12 May 2006, New York, USA. https://oro.open.ac.uk/28516/.
d'Aquin, M. and Lopez, V. (2008). Finding answers on the semantic web: what S said to W. Nodalities Magazine(4), pp. 22–23. https://oro.open.ac.uk/28572/.
Sabou, M., Lopez, V., Motta, E. and Uren, V. (2006). Ontology selection: ontology evaluation on the real Semantic Web. In: 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2006), 23-26 May 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23648/.
Lei, Y., Lopez, V. and Motta, E. (2006). An infrastructure for building semantic web portals. In: International Workshop on Web Information Systems Modeling (WISM 2006), 5-9 Jun 2006, Luxemburg. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23616/.
Fernández, M., Cantador, I., López, V., Vallet, D., Castells, P. and Motta, E. (2011). Semantically enhanced information retrieval: an ontology-based approach. Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 9(4), pp. 434–452. https://oro.open.ac.uk/25712/.
Gracia, J., Lopez, V., d'Aquin, M., Sabou, M., Motta, E. and Mena, E. (2007). Solving semantic ambiguity to improve semantic web based ontology matching. In: The 2nd International Workshop on Ontology Matching 2007, 11 Nov 2007, Busan, South Korea. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23564/.
d'Aquin, M., Lopez, V. and Motta, E. (2008). FABilT – finding answers in a billion triples. In: The 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008), 26-30 Oct 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23488/.
d'Aquin, M., Sabou, M., Motta, E., Angeletou, S., Gridinoc, L., Lopez, V. and Zablith, F. (2008). What can be done with the Semantic Web? An overview of Watson-based applications. In: The Fifth Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, 15-17 Dec 2008, Rome, Italy. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23522/.
Fernandez, M., Lopez, V., Sabou, M., Uren, V., Vallet, D., Motta, E. and Castells, P. (2009). Using TREC for cross-comparison between classic IR and ontology-based search models at a Web scale. In: Semantic Search 2009 Workshop at the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009), 20 Apr 2009, Madrid, Spain. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23481/.
Uren, V., Lei, Y., Lopez, V., Liu, H., Motta, E. and Giordanino, M. (2007). The usability of semantic search tools: a review. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 22(4), pp. 361–377. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23501/.
Lopez, V., Nikolov, A., Fernandez, M., Sabou, M., Uren, V. and Motta, E. (2009). Merging and ranking answers in the Semantic Web: the wisdom of crowds. In: 4th Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2009), 7-9 Dec 2009, Shanghai, China. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23445/.
Lopez, V., Sabou, M., Uren, V. and Motta, E. (2009). Cross-ontology question answering on the Semantic Web – an initial evaluation. In: The 5th Intl. Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2009), 1-4 Sep 2009, Redondo Beach, CA, USA. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23482/.
Uren, V., Sabou, M., Motta, E., Fernandez, M., Lopez, V. and Lei, Y. (2010). Reflections on five years of evaluating semantic search systems. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (IJMSO), 5(2), pp. 87–98. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23446/.
Fernandez, M., Lopez, V., Motta, E., Sabou, M., Uren, V., Vallet, D. and Castells, P. (2008). Semantic search meets the Web. In: 2008 IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, 4-7 Aug 2008, Santa Clara, CA, USA. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23492/.
d'Aquin, M., Motta, E., Sabou, M., Angeletou, S., Gridinoc, L., Lopez, V. and Guidi, D. (2008). Towards a New Generation of Semantic Web Applications. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(3), pp. 20–28. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23498/.
Tech Reports
State of the art on Semantic Question Answering
Techreport ID: kmi-07-03
Date: 2007
Author(s): Vanessa Lopez, Enrico Motta, Victoria Uren, Marta Sabou
Ontology-driven Question Answering in AquaLog
Techreport ID: kmi-04-05
Date: 2004
Author(s): Vanessa Lopez, Enrico Motta
