Archive for the ‘in English’ Category

Friday, 26th of November: dissertation defence by Eetu Mäkelä and guest lecture by professor Lora Aroyo of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

(väitöstiedote suomeksi)

Please be welcome to Eetu Mäkelä’s public defence of his doctoral thesis on View-Based User Interfaces for the Semantic Web. The defence will take place on Friday, the 26th of November, at 12 noon at the TUAS Building (Otaniementie 17, Espoo), Auditorium TU2. The defence will also be broadcast live over the internet here.

The content of the dissertation to be presented deals with the benefits that may be gained from publishing data using Semantic Web techniques, and how these benefits can be realized. Particular emphasis is placed on how originally varied and heterogeneous data can be linked to each other, and what new functionalities this enables for an end-user. Also discussed are how these functionalities are best implemented in user interfaces and system architecture.

The work in the thesis focuses mostly on publishing cultural heritage information in national level integrated portals. During the work two such were produced: www.museosuomi.fi and www.kulttuurisampo.fi. Of these, MuseumFinland was awarded both the Semantic Web Challenge award of the international research community as well as the Finnish prime minister’s honorary mention for the most innovative web application of the year. Other content areas discussed are e-Health, e-Government, e-Learning and e-Commerce.

As examples of the user interfaces developed during the work, data exploration interfaces were implemented that can answer questions such as “How beard fashions changed in the end of the 19th century?”, “which themes were the most popular in Finnish fiction in the year 2007?”, “what are the most popular colors of peoples’ underwear?” and “how are the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the French emperor Napoleon the first connected to each other?”.

The viewpoint of an information provider is catered for in the section of the thesis discussing production and publishing architectures for Linked Open Data, as well as the problems faced in integrating vastly heterogeneous data.

The dissertation is available for download here (pdf).


Preceding the dissertation, the opponent, professor Lora Aroyo (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will give a guest lecture at the same auditorium at 10:15-11:00 on “User Interaction and Personalization with Semantics”.

Abstract:
In this talk I will present three use cases of how the use of semantics (1) brings added value and (2) introduces new challenges for the user interaction and personalization. The main focus of this research is to investigate how knowledge patterns in Linked Open Data can help in the process of consuming semantically enriched Web content. The three use cases are explored in the context of three projects NoTube (personalized access to TV content using content patterns in Linked Open Data), CHIP (personalized access to enriched museum collections using content patterns in domain ontologies), WAISDA? (interactive tagging game to collect user-generated data and use it for annotation of audio-visual collections). I will also demonstrate some of the prototypes developed for these use cases.

Project links:
http://notube.tv
http://chip-project.org
http://waisda.nl

Short bio:
Lora Aroyo is now an assistant professor at the Web & Media Group, VU University Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Currently she is technical coordinator for the EU Project NoTube, lead researcher for the VU in the EU Project PrestoPrime and for the CATCH project Agora. Previously she was also project coordinator for the CATCH project CHIP. She has written numerous publications in leading conferences and journals the fields of personalization, user modeling and semantic web. She has also been involved in the organizations of various conferences, workshops and journal special issues, most notably as PC Chair for ESWC2009 and ISWC2011, Conference Chair for ESWC2010, and as member of the editorial board of the UMUAI journal and the Semantic Web Journal. Her main research interests are in facilitating personalized access to Web content collections by utilizing Semantic and Social Web technologies for user modelling and recommendations.

1st Prize to DataFinland in Apps4Finland: Doing Good With Open Data Competition.

Friday, October 15th, 2010

“DataFinland – Semantic Search and Annotation Tool for Open Datasets”
particated in the Apps4Finland competition organized by the Finnish Society of Web Democracy .
DataFinland is a demonstration of a national data catalog of open, possibly linked datasets on the Semantic Web.

More info about the system at Apps4Finland and DataFinland homepage.

Friday 23rd April at noon: Tomi Kauppinen´s dissertation on Methods for Creating and Using Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Welcome to Tomi Kauppinen’s public defence of his doctoral thesis on Methods for Creating and Using Geospatio-temporal Semantic Web. The defence will take place on Friday 23rd April, 2010, at 12 noon at the Aalto University, TUAS Building (Otaniementie 17, Espoo), Auditorium AS2.

Download the dissertation (pdf)


Preceding the dissertation, the opponent prof. Werner Kuhn will give a guest lecture at the same address, auditorium TU1 at 10:15-11:00: Werner Kuhn: Sensors everywhere – but what are they sensing? Ontology and the sensor web.

Abstract: Sensor networks remain largely disconnected from the general web, sensor services cannot be assessed for semantic interoperability, and core notions of sensor technology standards remain ambiguous. In this talk, I present a sensor observation ontology addressing these issues.

It treats observation as an informational rather than technological process, relates observations to real world phenomena, separates symbolization from signal processing, includes human observations, and supports sensor fusion. The ontology is formalized in Haskell, the standard functional language, offering significantly more powerful modeling capabilities than, for example, OWL. An outlook will be given on how to deal with resolution and uncertainty, location and time, trust and reputation, as well as actuators and observation-action cycles.

Brief CV: Werner Kuhn is a professor at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany. He leads MUSIL (the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab), a research group working on semantic interoperability problems in the semantic and social web. Since 2002, MUSIL has been establishing foundations for Semantic Reference Systems. Werner has published on topics ranging from human-computer interaction through interoperability standards to geospatial semantics.

CfP: Ontology Repositories and Editors

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

SeCo is participating in organizing The 1st International Workshop on Ontology Repositories and Editors for the Semantic Web, ORES 2010, taking place at the Extended Semantic Web Conference ESWC 2010 at Crete, in May-June this Summer. The call for papers is now public and deadline for submissions is March 1, 2010.

The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity for networking and learning the global status of the Ontology repositories and editors!

SeCo’s own contributions in this field include the National Ontology Library ONKI and the Browser-based Annotation Editor SAHA.

SmartMuseum system demonstrated in Malta and Florence

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

The SmartMuseum mobile system demonstrator was finished and demonstrated at the Cultural Heritage Online conference in Florence, Dec 15-16. The first public demonstration of the system took place in Malta at the Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing (SEMAPRO).

The SmartMuseum project homepage contains a video demonstration of the system and as well as other information about the system and research behind it.

Best Paper award at SEMAPRO 2009 conference

Friday, October 16th, 2009

The SmartMuseum paper

Innar Liiv, Tanel Tammet, Tuukka Ruotsalo and Alar Kuusik: Personalized Context-aware recommendations in SMARTMUSEUM: Combining Semantics with Statistics. Proceedings of the The Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing (SEMAPRO 2009), IEEE Computer Society, October, 2009. Sliema, Malta.

got the Best Paper award at the Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing.

HealthFinland awarded with the Semantic Web Challenge 2008 Award

Monday, November 17th, 2008

The semantic portal “HealthFinland — Finnish Health Information on the Semantic Web”, created by SeCo as a part of the national FinnONTO-project, was awarded with the international Semantic Web Challenge Award at the 7th Intenational Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) in Karlsruhe, Germany, Oct 30, 2008. The system prototype and information about the project is available at the HealthFinland home page.

CultureSampo – Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web. National Museum, Sept. 25, 2008.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

The semantic portal CultureSampo – Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web is released on Sept 25, 2008. The publication event is organized
at the National Museum of Finland. For more information, see
the event home page.

Finnish Ontology Library Service ONKI is on

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

The national Finnish Ontology Library Service ONKI was released as a Living Laboratory service at http://www.yso.fi/ in a publication event on Sept 12., 2008. See the YouTube video below,
taken at the event. Notice the recommendations “Related videos” confusing “Onki” with e.g. the “Legend of Tom Onki” produced by YouTube. By using ONKI and URIs better semantic recommendations could be provided!

ONKI service contains national and international ontologies published as services for human users and for machines through AJAX and Web Service APIs. The system is being used in several mash-up applications at SeCo and outside of it. For more information, see ONKI site and the home page at SeCo.

ONKI is ON

SeCo released the prototype of HealthFinland – Finnish Health Information on the Semantic Web

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

SeCo released the prototype of ‘HealthFinland – Finnish Health Information on the Semantic Web’
at a publication event on
Sept 12, 2008. For more information about this national semantic portal project, and for trying the system yourself, see our HealthFinland home page .