[Editor's Note: This is Juan Sequeda's final report from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 5 of ISWC 2011 was the third full day and last day of the conference. It started with a keynote from Gerhard Weikum title “For a few more triples“. The rest of the day consisted of sessions on Outrageous Ideas, Social Web, In-Use: Content Management,  Ontology Evaluation, Ontology Matching and Mapping, User Interaction and In Use: Applications. The highlight of the day was the Closing Ceremony, where the winners of several prizes were announced.

Weikum’s main argument was that ”we don’t need more triples, we need the right triples” in reference of the Linked Open Data cloud. One of the great challenges was to make information extraction automatic. “We need tools to add semantic knowledge to vanilla HTML” and emphasized that RDF data and Web contents need to be interconnected and that RDFa & microformats provide the mechanism. Three important NLP tasks needed in order to address these issues are Named Entity Detection, Co-reference resolution and Named Entity Disambiguation. Weikum stated that “linked data is great but still in its infancy” but insisted that triples needed to be added in order to capture dynamic, linkage and ubiquity.  He also stated that versioning should be a first class citizen for Linked Data. He concluded with two challenges:

1. Generate high quality sameAs links in RDFa across all LOD and
2. Add efficient top k ranking to queries over RDF in context.

The highlight of the day was the closing ceremony where the prizes were announced.

The Linked Data-a-thon gave three prizes:  Best Concept to Confomaton by Eurecom; Best Demo to Conference Explorer by FluidOps; and Best Utility to Friends and Facets by DFKI.

Best Poster went to Semantic Index and Best Demo went to ScienceWISE. The Best PhD proposal was Ontology Learning from Noisy Linked Data and the Best Mentor award went to Tom Heath. The winner of the Billion Triple Challenge was SchemEX — Web-Scale Indexed Schema Extraction of Linked Open Data. The Semantic Web Challenge Honorable mention went to The Linked Sensor Middleware – Connecting the real world and the Semantic Web. Second place went to Seevl – mining music connections to bring context and discovery to the music you like and the winner of the Semantic Web Challenge was BOTTARI: Location based Social Media Analysis with Semantic Web. The Most Outrageous Idea was Is data sharing the privilege of a few? Bringing linked data to 4.5 billion people. Best In-Use paper went to the IBM Watson team with their paper title Leveraging Community-built Knowledge for Type Coercion in Question Answering. Best Student Paper went to Decomposition and Modular Structure of BioPortal Ontologies. Last but not least, Best Paper went to DBpedia SPARQL Benchmark Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data. Congratulations to all the winners.

The closing ceremony ended with two special announcements: ISWC 2012 will be held in Boston from November 11 to 15 and ISWC 2013 will be in Sydney, Australia.

 

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