The end of October witnessed a small flood of KMi researchers, who travelled to the world down under to attend the 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2013), which was held in Sydney, Australia, Oct 21st-25th. The International Semantic Web Conference is held annually, and is regarded as the flagship event in the semantic web area. ISWC 2013 was no exception and attracted more than 400 people from 40 different countries.
KMi’s presence was one of the largest in the conference, with six delegates: Prof Enrico Motta, Dr Harith Alani, Dr. Mathieu d’Aquin and Dr. Miriam Fernandez, and PhD students Francesco Osborne and Ilaria Tiddi. Former KMiers, such as Liliana Cabral, Andriy Nikolov and Bassem Makni, were also present.
In particular, Harith Alani was the ISWC 2013 programme co-chair of ISWC, ensuring a high-quality research programme for the conference.
Enrico Motta and Francesco Osborne presented their paper "Exploring Scholarly Data with Rexplore" (co-authored with Paul Mulholland) in the highly competitive Research Track (21% acceptance rate). Mathieu D’Aquin and Keerthi Thomas contributed to the Workshop "Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web – Policy and Technology" with the paper "Semantic Web Technologies for Social Translucence and Privacy Mirrors on the Web". Ilaria Tiddi took part in the Doctoral Consortium with the paper "Explaining data patterns using background knowledge from Linked Data".
Other KMi contributions were at the Poster and Demo Session and included "OU Social: Reaching Students in Social Media" by Miriam Fernandez, Harith Alani and Stuart Brown; "Modeling and Reasoning Upon Facebook Privacy Settings by Mathieu D’Aquin and Keerthi Thomas; and "Explaining Clusters with Inductive Logic Programming and Linked Data" by Ilaria Tiddi, Mathieu D’Aquin and Enrico Motta.
KMiers did not only demonstrate their scientific talent at this event, they also showed their social and dancing skills at the gala dinner held during a cruise in Sydney Harbour, where conference delegates were entertained by a dozen musicians and singers from the research community, who performed as part of the first Semantic Web Jam session!
In summary, despite the expedition conditions (30 hours for a one way trip), the 20C temperature difference between the inside and outside of the main Conference Hall, and the various external temptations, such as cute Koalas and the bars on Bondi Beach, ISWC 2013 turned out to be yet another successful event for both KMi and the wider Semantic Web community.