Prof. Ian Horrocks
Speech Title:
Speech Abstract: So called "Semantic Technologies" are rapidly becoming mainstream technologies, with RDF and OWL now being deployed in diverse application domains, and with major technology vendors starting to augment their existing systems accordingly. For example, Oracle Inc. recently enhanced its well-known database management system with modules that use RDF/OWL ontologies to support "semantic data management", and their product brochure lists numerous application areas that can benefit from this technology, including Enterprise Information Integration, Knowledge Mining, Finance, Compliance Management and Life Science Research.  This is, however, only the first step for Semantic Web research; we need to demonstrate that the Semantic Technologies we are developing can (be made to) exhibit robust scalability if deployments in large scale applications are to be successful. In this talk I will review the evolution of Semantic Technologies to date, and show how research ideas from logic based knowledge representation developed into a mainstream technology. I will then go on to examine the scalability challenges arising from deployment in large scale applications, and discuss ongoing research aimed at addressing them.

Speaker Bio: Prof. Ian Horrocks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation, particularly ontology languages, description logic, and optimised reasoning algorithms. His work on tableau reasoning for very expressive description logics has formed the basis of most description logic reasoning systems in use today, including Racer, FaCT++, HermiT and Pellet. Professor Horrocks was jointly responsible for development of the OIL and DAML+OIL ontology languages, and he played a central role in the development of the Web Ontology Language OWL. These languages and associated tools have been used by the Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium, the National Cancer Institute in America, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization the World Wide Web Consortium, and a range of major corporations and government agencies.

Dr. Mark Greaves
Speech Title: Semantics and the Crowd.

Speech Abstract: This talk will be focused on semantic wikis, a new type of wiki that combines semantic technology and wiki-based social mechanisms. Semantic wikis marry the structure and flexibility of data semantics to the crowdsourcing power of a wiki. In my talk, I will show how wiki conventions can be extended to encompass structured data, which can then be used for better organization of content, better browsing and navigation experiences (such as faceted browsing), better visualizations, and more tailored user experiences. We will also present a range of interesting applications of semantic wikis, focusing on those built with Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) family of open source semantic extensions to the MediaWiki software which powers Wikipedia.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Mark Greaves is currently Director, Knowledge Systems at Vulcan, Inc. Vulcan is the private investment vehicle for Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft, www.vulcan.com). At Vulcan, he is sponsoring advanced research in large knowledge bases and advanced web technologies, including Project Halo (www.projecthalo.com).  Formerly, Mark was Program Manager in DARPA's Information Exploitation Office (IXO) for the DAML, UltraLog, and Advanced Logistics Projects. At DARPA, he has sponsored research on logistics and supply chain control technologies, formal ontology specification, semantic web technology, and the application of software agent technology to problems of distributed control of complex systems-of-systems. Prior to coming to DARPA, he led advanced programs in software agent technology at the Mathematics and Computing Technology group of Boeing's Phantom Works division. His main research interests are in mathematical logic, semantic web, and software agent technology, about which he has published two books and several papers.

Prof. Abraham Bernstein
Speech Title: How to Travel the Web of Data at Warp Speed...

Speech Abstract: The Web of Data has grown immensely over the past years. From only one dataset in 2007 the linked portion of the Open Data Cloud has grown to over 31 billion triples usually shown in the diagrams and a plethora of open data sets published by individuals, organizations and governments all over the world usually not shown. Given this immense growth the question arises how to process these data. Even if you can process 10'000 triples per second it will still take more than 861 hours to process the whole cloud… so algorithms traveling (or traversing) the linked data cloud using conventional methods are going to be slow.In this talk I will highlight some recent advances that point in the direction of how we can overcome the problem of processing this large cloud. Rather that trying to process these data in the traditional fashion these approaches rethink Semantic Web / Linked Data  processing to approach the ideal: warp speed travel for algorithms on the linked data cloud.("Warp Speed" is a notion popularized by Science Fiction series such as Star Trek to denote faster than light travel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Trek) )

Speaker Bio:  Prof. Abraham Bernstein is a Full Professor at the Department of Informatics (Institut für Informatik) of the University of Zurich. He mainly conduct research on the Semantic Web and Knowledge Discovery. His work draws from both social science (organizational psychology/sociology) and technical (computer science, artificial intelligence) foundations. Before coming to Zurich he was an Assistant Professor, at the Information Systems Department in New York University's Stern School of Business, and received a Ph.D. at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he worked with Prof. Thomas W. Malone at the Center for Coordination Science.