I-SEMANTICS 2011: Best Paper Award & Triplification Challenge Winners

This year the I-SEMANTICS conference gave away prices for the best scientific paper and the most promising triplifications.

The best paper award went to Pablo N. Mendes, Max Jakob, Andrés García-Silva and Christian Bizer for their contribution “DBpedia Spotlight: Shedding Light on the Web of Documents“.

Abstract: The paper impressively shows how Linked Open Data can be utilized  as background knowledge within document-oriented applications such as search and faceted browsing. As a step towards interconnecting the Web of Documents with the Web of Data, the authors developed DBpedia Spotlight, a system for automatically annotating text documents with DBpedia URIs. DBpedia Spotlight allows users to configure the annotations to their specific needs through the DBpedia Ontology and quality measures such as prominence, topical pertinence, contextual ambiguity and disambiguation confidence. They compare their approach with the state of the art in disambiguation, and evaluate their results in light of three baselines and six publicly available annotation systems, demonstrating the competitiveness of the system. DBpedia Spotlight is shared as open source and deployed as a Web Service freely available for public use.

For the 4th time I-SEMANTICS hosted the Triplification Challenge, an event aiming at stimulating the availability of large quantities of RDF data and showcasing practical applications built on top of them. The Challenge consisted of an unspecific “open data track” and a dedicated “open government data track” for which one winner was selected. The prize money of 1000 Euro each was sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany.

The “open data track” award went to Daniel Garijo, Boris Villazón and Oscar Corcho for their contribution “A Provenance-Aware Linked Data Application for Trip Management and Organization“.

Abstract: The authors present El Viajero, an application for exploiting, managing and organizing Linked Data in the domain of news and blogs about travelling. El Viajero makes use of several heterogeneous datasets to help users to plan future trips, and relies on the Open Provenance Model for modeling the provenance information of the resources.

The “open government data track” award went to John Erickson, Yongmei Shi, Li Ding, Eric Rozell, Jin Zheng and Jim Hendler for their contribution “TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog“.

Abstract: The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) integrates a diverse selection of more than 70 government dataset catalogs from around the world. IOGDC demonstrates a practical dataset catalog metadata model for integrating diverse dataset catalogs collected from the real world and linking those catalogs into Linked Data Cloud. IOGDC’s faceted browsing and search interface provides a scalable and reconfigurable solution for finding and browsing open government datasets which also offers a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlight the potential for useful Linked Data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide.

All papers are available in the ACM Digital Library.

We thank all participants for their contributions and wish the winners all the best for their future work!