DKG Talks

In collaboration with SWSA, the Action organises a talk series on Distributed Knowledge Graphs and related aspects of Semantic Web research.


SpeakerTitleDate Link
Jerven Tjalling BollemanUniProt and others: FAIRly large and connected SPARQL in the life-sciences Mon Jun 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CEST)
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Peter F. Patel-SchneiderDoes the Knowledge Graphs community care about semantics? Wed Apr 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CEST)
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YouTube
Mark A. MusenSemantic Technology in Science: Enhancing Data Stewardship in Support of New Discovery Mon Mar 4th 2024 at 18:00 (CET)
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YouTube
Mayank KejriwalNeurosymbolic Approaches for Robust Domain-Specific Semantic Search: Current Progress and Future Opportunities Wed Jan 31st 2024 at 18:00 (CET)
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YouTube
Ilaria TiddiExplainability with Knowledge Graphs: what have we learnt? Wed Jan 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CET)
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YouTube
Terry R. PayneAutonomy, the Web and Semantic Web Services Wed Oct 4th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST)
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YouTube
Anupriya AnkolekarSupporting Professional Information Workflows With Knowledge Graphs Tue Sep 5th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST)
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YouTube
Ian HorrocksKR and the Semantic Web: What We Did Right (and Wrong) Wed May 17th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST)
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YouTube
Olaf HartigReflections on Linked Data Querying and Other Related Topics Mon Mar 7th 2022 at 18:00 (CET)
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Ora LassilaOn the broad applicability of Semantic Web technologies Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CET)
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  • Jerven Tjalling Bolleman: "UniProt and others: FAIRly large and connected SPARQL in the life-sciences"

    • When: Mon Jun 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Jerven has nurtured the UniProt Knowledge Graph as a member of the Swiss-Prot group at SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics for the last 17 years. He is responsible for the day to day running of the largest public, free to use and FAIR SPARQL endpoint. The UniProt RDF/KG has been in production since 2007 and available as a hosted SPARQL endpoint since 2014. As a principal software engineer Jerven’s role is to ensure that the FAIR principles are leveraged with a specific focus on Interoperability and Reusability to facilitate research in the life science domain.
    • About the talk: UniProt provides the largest public and free to use SPARQL endpoint on the internet. Why do we do it, and what are our considerations, including the economic aspect? FAIR is not just a slogan and we show an example of how SPARQL leverages the Interoperability between Accessible resources to Reuse data in ways that enable researchers to derive new insights. UniProt as a key resource in the life sciences has significant users and is a hub connecting 100s of data resources.

  • Peter F. Patel-Schneider: "Does the Knowledge Graphs community care about semantics?"

    • When: Wed Apr 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Peter F. Patel-Schneider received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1987. From 1983 to 1988 he was a member of the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research and Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. Peter then joined Bell Laboratories and remained there until 2012 when he joined the Nuance Artificial Intelligence and Language Laboratory. In 2019 he joined the Artificial Intelligence Center in Samsung Research America. From 2020 until he retired in 2023 Peter worked at PARC. Peter's research interests center on representing large-scale knowledge and information, particularly taking large amounts of data and turning it into knowledge. He has made long-term contributions to description and ontology logics, particularly the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language. He developed much of OWL, as well as SWRL, the Semantic Web Rule Language, and RDF, the W3C language for representing data in the Semantic Web. Peter has been working on extracting semantic information from data sources, allowing data to be more easily integrated into the Semantic Web. His current life goal is to put Wikidata on a firm semantic foundation.
    • About the talk: There has been considerable academic progress in providing formal model-theoretic semantic foundations for Semantic Web languages and other graph-based formalisms, which all can be characterized as Semantic Graphs. This work often provides both a well-specified meaning a particular graph-based formalism and a specification of how to query this formalism. Nonetheless most work using Semantic Graphs pays little attention to this body of literature. Common queries against graph- based formalisms produce results that are either incomplete or unsound with respect to either formal or intended semantics of the formalism. The inadequacy of standard SPARQL to query RDFS data and the common use of restrictive qualifiers in Wikidata are prime examples of this lack of attention to even the simplest of semantic foundations.

  • Mark A. Musen: "Semantic Technology in Science: Enhancing Data Stewardship in Support of New Discovery" (Stanford University)

    • When: Mon Mar 4th 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Dr. Musen is the Stanford Medicine Professor of Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University. He conducts research related to open science, intelligent systems, computational ontologies, and biomedical decision support. His group developed Protégé, the world's most widely used technology for building and managing terminologies and ontologies. He served as principal investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the original National Centers for Biomedical Computing created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, leading to the BioPortal ontology repository. He directs the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR), founded under the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative. CEDAR develops semantic technology to ease the authoring and management of experimental metadata. Dr. Musen was the recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association in 2006. He has been elected to the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
    • About the talk: Much of the Semantic Web research community emerged from the cadre of investigators who were studying the engineering of knowledge-based systems in the 1990s. Development of such systems required intense interactions between modelers and subject-matter experts to build symbolic representations of discipline-specific knowledge. Such knowledge-engineering activities may be making a comeback, as funders and regulators require scientists of all kinds to share their experimental datasets online, in a manner that makes the data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). At the core of data FAIRness is the idea that the metadata that describe experimental datasets must adhere to the standards used by the relevant scientific communities, aiding dataset search and integration. Typically, those metadata standards are not well specified, which impedes the ability of researchers to locate existing datasets and to perform secondary analysis in the hope of making new discoveries. This situation is driving a new kind of knowledge engineering—one to formalize the preferences of various scientific communities regarding the way their experiments should be described. The CEDAR Workbench, a suite of tools that builds on other semantic technologies that we have developed at Stanford University, demonstrates how the elicitation and formal representation of community standards for experimental metadata both enhances access to and reuse of scientific datasets and, by extension, can lead to better science.

  • Mayank Kejriwal: "Neurosymbolic Approaches for Robust Domain-Specific Semantic Search: Current Progress and Future Opportunities" (University of Southern California)

    • When: Wed Jan 31st 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Mayank Kejriwal is a research assistant professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), and a principal scientist in the USC Information Sciences Institute. Prior to joining USC, he received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. His PhD thesis was awarded the SWSA Dissertation Award in 2017. At USC, he is the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Complex Systems group, and is also affiliated with the Center on Knowledge Graphs and theAI4Health initiative. His research has been published in international venues such as ISWC, ESWC, Semantic Web Journal, Royal Society Open Science, and several others. He is the author of four books, including an MIT Press textbook on knowledge graphs that has been republished in several languages.
    • About the talk: With the advent of large language models (LLMs), previous state-of-the- art performance has been exceeded on a number of difficult challenges in the AI community, including commonsense reasoning, question answering (and other rich forms of information retrieval), text summarization, and computational creativity. Knowledge graphs have been used to address some of these problems before. This talk will address the question of whether, and how, knowledge graphs and LLMs can be used synergistically in an important application in both industry and the Semantic Web: domain-specific search. My thesis is that a neurosymbolic approach can allow us to use the 'best of both worlds' in tackling this challenging problem in a robust manner. I will discuss current progress in this area in both my research group, and others, and outline the key challenges and future opportunities still outstanding in this area.

  • Ilaria Tiddi: "Explainability with Knowledge Graphs: what have we learnt?" (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

    • When: Wed Jan 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Ilaria Tiddi is an Assistant Professor in Hybrid Intelligence at the Knowledge in AI (KAI) group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL). Her research focuses on creating systems that generate complex narratives through a combination of semantic technologies, open data and machine learning, applied mostly in scientific and robotics scenarios. She is Editor-in-Chief of the CEUR-WS publication, part of the Steering Committee for the Hybrid Human-AI Conference, and Coordinator of the international Staff Exchange for the Dutch Hybrid Intelligence consortium. Since 2014, she is regularly active in the OCs/PCs of the major venues in the KR field (ISWC/ESWC, HHAI, WWW, CIKM, IJCAI/ECAI).
    • About the talk: We hear about explanations for AI all the time these days, since the the latest (deep) machine learning solutions revealed to provide highly accurate, but hardly scrutable and interpretable decisions. In 2013, we were looking into using Knowledge Graphs to create explanations from ML outputs, well before we even heard of the term eXplainable AI (XAI, coined by DARPA in 2017). In this teasing talk, we will look into this work from today’s perspective, including what has been done in this context, whether it is still useful and relevant, and whether the same methods still apply. We will conclude with a discussion on the future of these ideas, hoping to foster new research in this direction.

  • Terry R. Payne: "Autonomy, the Web and Semantic Web Services"

    • When: Wed Oct 4th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Terry Payne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. He has been active in the area of agent-based computing and knowledge-based systems and services since the mid 90ies, and has a specific interest is in the use of ontological knowledge for the support of autonomous service discovery and provision. He is actively exploring the use of autonomous approaches to facilitate the communication and collaboration of heterogeneous systems, using a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches. This supports the longer term aim of describing, discovering and utilising autonomous devices and services in a variety of settings, including life sciences and laboratory environments.
    • About the talk: One of the early visions of Agent based Computing was the goal of bringing multiple systems together serendipitously, and have complex behaviour emerge as a consequence of their co-existence, driven by user goals or external events (for example, in the case of RoboCupRescue, which was inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake). Whilst syntactic interoperability has been addressed through a plethora of (primarily web-based) standards; semantic interoperability remained a key challenge. When Darpa announced DAML, the DARPA Agent Markup Language (which later evolved into OWL), there was a keen desire to explore how services themselves could be modelled through ontologies. In this talk I’ll look back at the early days of Semantic Web Services, including the evolution of DAML-S and its successor, OWL-S, and reflect on how they were viewed from different perspectives. The talk will then provide a view on emerging opportunities for Autonomy and the use of services, from today’s Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph perspective.

  • Anupriya Ankolekar: "Supporting Professional Information Workflows With Knowledge Graphs" (SWSA Ten-Year Award 2011)

    • When: Tue Sep 5th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Anupriya Ankolekar is Co-Founder & Principal Scientist at ModuleQ, an enterprise AI startup focussed on empowering knowledge professionals through proactive, mission-critical business intelligence and insights. Prior to ModuleQ, Anupriya was a Principal Research Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto and an Assistant Professor at AIFB Institute, part of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. She holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen.
    • About the talk: The vision of agents supporting human tasks and workflows gave rise to the field of Semantic Web, which in turn led to significant developments, such as web ontologies, linked data, semantic web services, and knowledge graphs. In this talk, I'll make the case that supporting information workflows for professional, strategic knowledge work and learning is a valuable application area for knowledge graphs. Professional information workflows are complex, role-dependent and stretch across application and enterprise boundaries. I'll describe examples of such workflows, outline a vision for proactive human-centred AI support for them and describe our approach at ModuleQ inspired by knowledge graphs. Key elements of our approach are explicit representation of professional and organizational priorities, information fusion of work traces across applications, and contextual knowledge to interpret professional work and to proactively identify relevant content and resources. I'll conclude with some of the challenges and open questions for building effective information workflow support.

  • Ian Horrocks: "KR and the Semantic Web: What We Did Right (and Wrong)" (SWSA Ten-Year Award 2013)

    • When: Wed May 17th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • About the speaker: Ian Horrocks is a full professor in the Oxford University Department of Computer Science, a visiting professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo and a co-founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and a British Computer Society Lovelace Medalist. His research concerns the representation of knowledge, and the efficient manipulation of such knowledge by computers. He played a leading role in establishing the Semantic Web as a significant research field, pioneering many of the underlying logics, algorithms, optimisation techniques, and reasoning systems. He has contributed to the development of several widely used reasoning systems including FaCT++, HermiT, Elk and RDFox. He has published more than 300 papers in major international conferences and journals, winning best paper prizes at KR-98, AAAI-2010, and IJCAI-2017, and test of time awards at ISWC-2013, KR-2020 and CADE-2021. He is one of the UK’s most highly cited computer scientists, with more than 59,000 citations, and an h-index of 99.
    • About the talk: Augmenting the web to include some form of Knowledge Representation (KR) was one of the first directions for Semantic Web research and led to the development of the OWL KR language(s) and the SPARQL query language. In this talk I will recall the development of these languages and their genesis in foundational research, highlighting what I believe were the many good design decisions as well as a few not so good. I will then go on to trace the development of KR systems and applications based on these technologies and argue that the this represents a significant success story for Semantic Web research.

  • Ora Lassila: "On the broad applicability of Semantic Web technologies" (SWSA Ten-Year award 2011)

    • When: Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
    • Where: YouTube
    • 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?"

    • Recording: YouTube
    • When: Thu Oct 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CEST) / Thu Oct 7th 2021 at 12:00 (EDT) / Fri Oct 8th 2021 at 0:00 (CST)
    • Moderator: Catia Pesquita
    • Panelist: Jim Hendler, Natasha Noy, Rudi Studer
    • Learn more