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
Fernandez, M., Tirado, A., Pavon-Perez, A., Duddin, K., Zhang, M., Bakina, K., Bandara, A., Capdevila, R., Lazard, L. and Jurasz, O. (2025) Co-creating an Ontology of Online Gender-Based Harms: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ISWC 2025 - The 24th International Semantic Web Conference, Nara, Japan
Ghafourian, Y., Hanbury, A. and Knoth, P. (2025) Ranking To Learn: Human Experts, Search Engines, or LLMs for Learning Guidance, TPDL 2025: The 29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Tampere, Finland
Cancellieri, M., El-Ebshihy, A., Fink, T., Fröbe, M., GaluÅ¡Äáková, P., Goeuriot, L., Iommi, D., Keller, J., Knoth, P., Mulhem, P., Piroi, F., Pride, D. and Schaer, P. (2025) Extended Abstract of LongEval at CLEF 2025: Longitudinal Evaluation of IR Systems on Web and Scientific Data, 16th International Conference of the CLEF Association (CLEF 2025), Madrid, Spain
Tsaneva, S., Dessì, D., Osborne, F. and Sabou, M. (2025) Knowledge graph validation by integrating LLMs and human-in-the-loop, Information Processing & Management, 62, Elsevier
Cancellieri, M., Docekal, M., Pride, D., Gruenpeter, M., Douard, D. and Knoth, P. (2025) Interoperable verification and dissemination of software assets in repositories using COAR Notify, The 20th International Conference on Open Repositories, Chicago, Illinois, USA
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