About the speaker:
Olaf Hartig is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science of Linköping University.
Additionally, he is an Amazon Scholar working with the Neptune graph database team at Amazon Web Services. Olaf is
interested in problems related to the management of databases and knowledge, with a focus on graph data and data that is
distributed over multiple, autonomous and/or heterogeneous sources. He received the 2019 SWSA Ten-Year Award for a paper
which pioneered the idea of traversal-based query execution as well as querying Linked Data on the Web in general, and
for his PhD thesis on the foundations of Linked Data queries, he was honored with the SWSA Distinguished Dissertation
Award in 2015.
About the talk:
When aiming to evolve the World Wide Web into a Web of interlinked data ready for software agents and applications to
consume and act upon, Semantic Web researchers have advanced the state of the art of federated data management, with
novel ideas that focus on discoverability, interoperability, and automation. While the adoption and the practicality of
these ideas did, generally, not pan out as expected or hoped for, core aspects of the ideas have the potential to be
carried over as key ingredients of new approaches to interact with decentralized knowledge graphs and to build
decentralized data architectures. In this talk I will reflect on these earlier ideas and describe research problems that
need to be addressed in order to carry these ideas forward.
Ora Lassila: "On the broad applicability of Semantic Web technologies" (SWSA Ten-Year award 2011)
When: Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CET) / Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 12:00 (EST) / Wed Dec 8th 2021 at 1:00 (CST)
About the speaker:
Ora Lassila is a Principal Technologist at Amazon
Web Services, working in the Neptune graph database team. Earlier, he
has held research and product development positions in many
organizations interested in complex data problems, ontologies, and AI.
Together with his co-authors he was the recipient of the first SWSA
“10-year award”. He was also a co-author of the original RDF
specification as well as a co-author of the seminal article on the
Semantic Web. Dr. Lassila is a graduate of the Helsinki University of
Technology.
About the talk:
The Semantic Web, despite how it was originally advertised,
was not a replacement for the World Wide Web, nor was it really
knowledge representation (KR) solely for the Web. Rather, the Semantic
Web is KR using Web technologies. The different technologies and
standards of the Semantic Web have broad applicability in many areas
distinctly outside of what we consider to be the “Web”. The DAML-S
(later OWL-S) effort was one such example: apply ontologies to the
problem of describing the semantics of functionality and services (in
this case Web services, but the concept was more general). While the
effort may not have been successful in the long term, it was an early
example of the application of Semantic Web technologies and approaches
to a wide variety of use cases and domains. These include agent-based
computing, ubiquitous computing, context-awareness, policies, privacy,
enterprise knowledge graphs, and many others. But there is still an
even bigger role for Semantic Web technologies: Modern enterprise data
practice is messy, with daunting problems such as data integration,
elimination of “data silos”, and alignment of semantics. This
“messiness” will be perpetuated until we have a practical unifying
logical representation for data and semantics, and the promise of
Semantic Web is that it could be this representation.
SWSA Panel "20 years into ISWC: What's next beyond Knowledge Graphs?"