Semantic Web in the Plateau of Productivity

Ioannis Stavrakantonakis

27.06.2015

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I take no responsibility for any harm or damage caused to any one because of the information provided in this presentation.

Plateau?

Gartner’s hype cycle

Morphology of Plateau

• Research to bridge the gap between theory and application.

• Real world application needs could be interesting research directions.

• Expectations are higher than used to - evaluation of the added value to the status quo.

Plateau territories

Government

Academia

Industry

Government

- Neelie Kroes, June 2nd 2015

“We should embrace change, because we have to.Our future will be based on how we are dealing with change.”

Government

• Exposing (Linked) Open Data

- data.gv.at

- open-data.europa.eu/en/data/

- data.gov

• Funding research projects

Open Data

Academia

University of Innsbruck

Academia• Research projects

• Research projects with the industry (mainly SMEs) funded by governmental schemes

• Courses on Semantic Web

• Conferences(ESWC, ISWC, WWW, SEMANTiCS, etc.)

• PhD theses

ODINE(Open Data Incubator

Europe)

“ODINE will provide an accelerator programme for SMEs and startups to establish business in open data related area.”

• up to €100,000 per company

• networking with VCs, angel investors, business mentors

opendataincubator.eu

Courses

• University Courses on-campus

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC): Knowledge Engineering with Semantic Web Technologies 2015, by Harald Sack, open.hpi.de/courses/semanticweb2015

PhD Theses• Serendipitous Web Applications through

Semantic Hypermedia. Ruben Verborgh, 2014

• Leveraging The Consumption of Linguistic Open Data for Educational Purposes. Antonio J. Roa-Valverde, 2015

• SUMMA: A Common API for Linked Data Entity Summaries. Andreas Thalhammer, candidate

• Leveraging Websites to APIs using Semantics. Ioannis Stavrakantonakis, candidate

Serendipitous Web Applications through

Semantic Hypermedia

“… to enable a new generation of intelligent Web clients through hypermedia and semantics,

enabling a more serendipitous Web…”

“How can semantic hypermedia improve the serendipitous reuse of data and applications on

the Web?”

Ruben Verborgh

Leveraging the consumption of Linguistic Open Data for Educational

Purposes

“we exploit the practical dimension of Wiktionary”

“…with our educational use case, we show how our research can be put in practice in the context of a mobile application designed exclusively for

supporting users in the acquisition of new foreign second language (FSL) vocabulary.”

Antonio J. Roa-Valverde

A Common API for Linked Data Entity Summaries

“We introduce SUMMA, an API definition that enables to decouple generation and

presentation of summaries. It enables multiple consumers to retrieve summaries from multiple

providers in a unified and lightweight way.”

Andreas Thalhammer

Leveraging Websites to APIs using Semantics

“helps to identify the most appropriate set of LOV vocabulary terms for a given webpage by

leveraging the existing dynamics within the LOV graph and the usage patterns in the LOD

cloud.”

“…an online service endpoint, which can be used by developers and ontology engineers…”

Ioannis Stavrakantonakis

Industry

Google data center water pipes

Industry

• BBC(linked data platform, bbc.co.uk/things)

• Google(schema.org, knowledge graph, email markup)

• Facebook(graph search, FAIR)

BBC

• Dynamic Semantic Publishing Framework provided by Ontotext

- 800+ Dynamic pages generated through SPARQL for the World Cup 2010

- 2 million page requests/day

• Linked Data Platform

BBC Things

Knowledge graph

Google Email markup“Unlock the power of your emails with

schema.org”

JSON-LD + schema.org actions

e.g. schema.org/RsvpAction that “extends” the schema.org/Action

schema.org

• Contract with the developers about the understandable metadata terms on the published web content

• Uptake: 17% of 15M domains according to the Common Web Crawler, Q4 2014

• Misuse of the vocabulary of some type >50%, Meusel et al. at ESWC 2015

Facebook AI Research

“…we plan to work openly with and invest in the AI research community in France, the EU, and

beyond as we strive to make meaningful progress in these fields. We have a collaborative agreement

in place with INRIA…”

research.facebook.com/ai/

Facebook + INRIA

Best way to bridge the gap is to bring the two sides under the same roof.

result: Facebook AI Research, Paris

Outlook

Problems

• Open Data portals with SPARQL endpoints. How many developers are able to use that?

• Is there enough prototypes using Semantic Technologies and/or consuming Open Data?

• Educate developers.

What to do?• Find broken parts in the funnel and fix them,

build a product, PhD, MSc, push a solution on github.

• Encourage research directions with practical applications.

• Providing data dumps or SPARQL endpoints does not help neither the Semantic Web per se, nor the real Web.

• Publish MOOC online courses.

What else to do?

• Understand and promote the realistic added value of the Semantic Web technologies.

• Applied research.

• Solutions that push further the real world through the Web.

• Envision the next step for the Web.

What do you think?

–Yoda, Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

Photo credits

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

• http://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2015/6/415345/innovation-lecture-2015-by-neelie-kroes-on-change

• http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech