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The Semantic Web:
How Semantics Make Better Web, Search and Databases?
26 June 2007, Tuesday, 7pm
Mr Atanas Kiryakov
Head of Ontotext Lab
Sirma Group
In the 80s there were huge expectations about artificial intelligence (AI). As it happens quite often with promising scientific or technological trends, AI got overloaded of promises, failed to deliver, and went out of fashion. In the 90s ontologies became the new buzz word, which was able to make new promises on the basis of many of the AI developments, e.g. knowledge representation and reasoning. In the late 90s, Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) pointed out the Semantic Web as the "next big thing" around Internet - it was defined as web of databases, which are understandable to the machines, because their meaning is defined by ontologies. Nowadays the enthusiasm about the Semantic Web still have not delivered much tangible results, but the standards developed for it (e.g. RDF and OWL) seize multiple "information-rich" areas, such as life-science research, and telecommunications.
The lecture will present how formal modelling of semantics can help in the implementation of better search engines, database management systems and web applications. The "fashionable" clothes will be stripped down, to show the core ideas and their advantages and limitations disregarding the labels. The talk will include introductions to some of the basics of linguistics, logic, knowledge representation, databases, and search. Those will be accompanied by how-stuff-works examples and elaboration of the role and benefit of using semantics. Finally, live demonstrations will show how users can take benefit, without taking care of all the complexity.
Presentation (PDF, 2.7MB, in English)
Video recording of this lecture (on Digital World's web site)
more about the lecturer
 Atanas Kiryakov is Head of Ontotext Lab, of Sirma Group, which develops core semantic technology with diverse areas of application, including: KM, Semantic Web, Enterprise Applications Integration, Business Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Online Recruitment. The laboratory is involved in research projects with total budget of over 90 MEuro in several areas related to KR, NLP, web services, business process management, and cognitive science. Ontotext is a leading Semantic Web technology provider being the developer of the KIM semantic annotation platform and the OWLIM semantic repository. The lab is also the lead developer of wsmo4j and WSMO Studio, and a major contributor to GATE and Sesame. Kiryakov joined Sirma - a top-3 Bulgarian software house - as a software engineer in 1993 and later on became a partner. In year 2000 he founded Ontotext and joined the board of Sirma Group. Between 2001 and 2004, Kiryakov was a member of the board of the Bulgarian Association of Software Companies (BASSCOM) and the chairman of its Working Group on Education, Research and Innovations. Since 2004 he is member of the board of Innovantage - a Business Intelligence provider for the UK recruitment market. Kiryakov obtained his M.Sc. degree in CS from Sofia University (1995) with a thesis in knowledge representation (KR). Between 1998 and 2000, as a Ph.D. student at the Linguistic Modelling Lab of BAS, he was researching the applications of the lexical knowledge bases for Information Retrieval (IR). In 2000, together with Kiril Simov, he organized of the first OntoLex workshop on “Ontologies and Lexical Knowledge Bases”, which is now having its 4th edition. His current research interests are in semantic annotation and search, large-scale semantic repositories and reasoning, (upper-level) ontology design, information extraction, IR, object consolidation. He is an organizer and a member of program committees of a number of international forums; author of more than 20 articles and book chapters. |