INVITED TALKS
Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center
Personal Page
Title: Ontologies and Folksonomies: False Friends
Abstract: "False friends" is a term used to describe words in different languages that appear similar but mean different things, like "eventually" in English and "eventualmente" in Italian. Ontologies, at least well engineered ones, and folksonomies, which are a product of large scale "social tagging" of web artifacts, have this relationship as well: they appear similar but mean different things. In this talk I will discuss the appearance of similarity and the actual difference and point out that being different is not bad thing.
Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Information Retrieval and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications.
Giovanni Tummarello, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland
Personal Page
Title: "Linked data on the Semantic Web: why and how to use it in your next project."
Abstract: In this presentation, I will illustrate the "Linked data on the Semantic Web" initiative. While conceptually simple, linked data is probably the most concrete artifact that the Semantic Web community can currently demonstrate: large databases have been already made available online using this paradigm and many will be added soon. I will then present some of the tools currently available to make use of such data from within applications and how to further increase the globally available data. Drawing from this material and coherently with such "pragmatic" view of the Semantic Web, I will then conclude highlighting some evident "TO DOs" and possible next steps.
Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D has a strong activity in real world semantic Web applications. In 2004 he initiated the SWAP conference series. Among his recent efforts are the DBin platform, an award winning P2P software for the creation of semantically structured knowledge in user communities, the Sindice linked data indexing engine, the RDFSync algorithm and Semantic Sitemaps. He also has a background in multimedia processing and computational intelligence with works on Multimedia Semantics such as the MPEG-7 Audio DB, an open source toolkit for harmonizing and processing MPEG-7 streams. He holds a postdoctoral researcher position at DERI Galway, where he is also Adjunct Lecturer and responsible for two EU projects under FP7.
