Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering

The Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering (SWOE) group at KIZI (one of its four research groups, over-arched by the virtual Knowledge Engineering Group) undertakes research in knowledge and data representation and management, in particularly in connection with the semantic web. The focal areas of the group currently are:

  • Linked data / Knowledge graph modeling, publishing, matchmaking and exploitation, especially for public sector, academic, e-commerce and encyclopedic (Wikipedia etc.) domains
  • Ontology and data vocabulary design and management
  • Ontology and data vocabulary analysis, evaluation and matching
  • Ontology and linked data visualization
  • Linked data / Knowledge graph mining

Notably, we use the term ‘ontological engineering’ as short for ‘ontology engineering and ontological data engineering’, i.e., we are not only interested in the proper design of ontologies (vocabularies) but also in their adequate use in describing data of various kinds.

The SWOE acronym can also be read – according to several web sources, referring to hybridization of (Wilkinson) “Sword” and “hoe” – as „long-handled weeder“ or „very lightweight, many angled weeding tool“. In our context, we can refer to the metaphor of weeding in view of long-term fruit in the semantic web garden. Consequently, also SWOE’s color among the KIZI groups is green.

For PhD vacancies: see the Czech version of this page (assuming the Czech-language branch of the PhD program; if you are interested in enrolling to the English-language branch, contact Prof. Vojtěch Svátek directly).

News

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  • 26-30 October 2019: The Resources Track of the 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), held in Auckland, was co-chaired by Vojtěch Svátek.
  • 28 October 2019: The NexusLinguarum COST Action (European network for Web-centred linguistic data science), with a 4-year duration, started. Vojtěch Svátek acts as one of the two Management Committee members for the Czech Republic and as the ITC Conference Grant Manager of the Action.
  • 11 July 2019: Vojtěch Svátek was promoted to an Associate Editor of Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics.
  • 8-31 May 2019: We enjoyed the presence of research visitors from the OEG group, UPM, Madrid – Maria Poveda-Villalon and Oscar Corcho. Maria is giving a talk on ontological engineering at our KEG seminar.
  • 1 May 2019: Ondřej Zamazal successfully concluded the habilitation process and became Associate Professor. This entitles him for both the PhD student full Advisorship (he is taking over Jana Vataščinová) and a tenured contract.
  • 1 April 2019: A start-up (and unofficial SWOE spin-off) project has been launched under the name of ContextMinds, with Marek Dudáš as the CEO. The developed tool allows for concept mapping (to be used especially in an educational context) with automated support by linked data resources.
  • 1 March 2019: A new, two-year, IGA (i.e., institutionally-funded) project is starting, coordinated by Viet Bach Nguyen and involving 3 faculty and 3 further (PhD and MSc) students. The project focuses on hybrid approaches to modeling concepts on the semantic web, combining ontologies, knowledge graphs and/or codelists.
  •  February 2019: The group members (M. Dudáš and V. Zeman) showcased their DBpedia-related tools at the DBpedia Meetup held at our university (co-organized by T. Kliegr from the DMKD group)
  • 1 February 2019: Besides his project (CSF FCatPoWO) contract, Marek Dudáš is also joining the Department as a part-time Assistant Professor. He will participate in the education of the Linked Data on the Web course, and a prospective course on graph data management and visualization.
  • 25 September 2018: Two new PhD students joined the group. Viet Bach Nguyen (supervised by V. Svátek) will research on semantic modeling of PhD student ‘journeys’, and Jana Vataščinová (currently supervised by V. Svátek, but in long term by O. Zamazal) on matching of biomedical ontologies.
  • 13 September 2018: M. Dudáš successfully defended his PhD thesis on Supporting ontology development with visual modeling tools. Congratulations! Marek is remaining a core SWOE member, primarily as project worker on the FCatPoWO project.
  • 20 July 2018: A survey article on ontology visualization, by M. Dudáš in collaboration with S. Lohmann (Fraunhofer), V. Svátek and D. Pavlov (ITMO) appeared in the Knowledge Engineering Review (IF > 1 ).
  • 14 June 2018: V. Svátek was promoted to Full Professor in Applied Informatics.
  • 24 May 2018: An article on term similarity benchmarks, written by T. Kliegr from the DMKD group, jointly with O. Zamazal, appeared in the Elsevier’s Data & Knowledge Engineering journal (IF ~ 1.7).
  • 2 February 2018: The team of the CSF-funded FCatPoWO (“Focused categorization power of web ontologies”) project gathered for its kick-off meeting.
  • 25 January 2018: Jindřich Mynarz successfully defended his PhD thesis on Matchmaking of bidders and public contracts using linked open data. Big congratulations for this achievement (and relief)! Since the beginning of October (following completion of his contract at OpenBudgets.eu) he also moved to MSD IT (a corporate innovation centre, based in Prague). We are staying in touch, since his work there also involves semantic technology – such as the Halyard RDF store – and there is a partnership between the company and the University.
  • 1 December 2017: The SWOE team has been awarded by the Czech Science Foundation, in a tough competition, a 3-year grant (2018-2020) for its project application on “Focused categorization power of web ontologies” (cf. an earlier EKAW 2016 paper on this topic). The project, coordinated by V. Svátek, will constitute a workload of approx. 46 PMs and will involve 5 faculty and several PhD/MSc students.
  • 21-25 October 2017: SWOE, represented by V. Svátek and O. Zamazal, gave/coauthored six talks altogether at the ISWC 2017 conference and collocated events; a journal track paper (on PatOMat), a poster paper (on EU project classification in OpenBudgets.eu), and four workshop papers: two at OM (both on the Alignment tool and its usage, as joint work with OKF Greece), one at WOP (on the MISO ontology pattern) and one at VOILA (on using LODSight for ontology usage visualization).
  • 11-14 September 2017: A poster paper co-authored by SWOE folks was presented at SEMANTiCS 2017 on a hot topic: “Competencies as a cost driver of querying Linked Data”.
  • 28 April 2017: V. Svátek co-authored an article in Methods of Information in Medicine (with his Charles Univ. PhD student K. Zvára and further colleagues) – not on a semantic web topic proper but still partly relevant to the ontological field.
  • April 2017: V. Svátek became SPC member of the ISWC 2017 conference.
  • 2 March 2017: Three publications of the group were awarded by the Dean of the Faculty for year 2016: the EKAW paper by Svátek, Zamazal and Vacura (first in the conference/book paper category), the JWS paper by Svátek, Dudáš and Zamazal (second in the journal article category), and the SEMANTiCS paper on DBquiz by Mynarz and Zeman (first in the PhD student category).
  • March 2017: The new paper describing the OntoFarm collection of ontologies (on which the ‘conference track’ of OAEI is based) appeared in Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics.
  • 1 November 2016: The JWS journal paper by T. Kliegr (DMKD group) and O. Zamazal was ranked 3rd in the annual Rector’s award. Congratulations!
  • 25 November 2016: We hosted a successful plenary meeting of the Horizon 2020 OpenBudgets.eu project, during which the first prototype of the software platform was officially announced. The meeting was preceded by a workshop on open fiscal data processing (in Czech).
  • 23 November 2016: SPARQLab was awarded the prize for the Best Student Project in the annual Czech OpenData Application contest. See also the article in the University online newsletter. (All materials are currently in Czech.)
  • June-November 2016: Papers have been co/presented by the group members at:
  • October 2016: The first version of SPARQLab, which is a web-based exercise-book for SPARQL language (authored by J. Mynarz, currently with Czech interface only), has been set up. The individual exercises consist in SPARQL query building according to a textual description. Each exercise is equiped with a an exemplary solution, to which is the student’s solution automatically compared. The current installation is underlain by a real-world RDF dataset (modeled according to the Data Cube Vocabulary) on Czech pension statistics. Topic-wise, the exercises concern both dataset exploration (such as finding out about the dimensions used) and domain-specific analyses (e.g., finding regions with highest disproportion between pensions of men and women.
  • September 2016: The article An ontological investigation over human relations in linked data (by Miroslav Vacura, Vojtěch Svátek and Aldo Gangemi) appeared in Applied Ontology.
  • 22 September 2016: Upon invitation of V. Svátek, Steffen Staab came to give a talk at the Prague Computer Science seminar.
  • 12-16 September 2016: Our and a few collaborating groups enjoyed a visit of Giancarlo Guizzardi from UFES, Brazil, who among other gave a talk at the KEG seminar, and collaboration plans have been set.
  • August 2016: The article Adapting ontologies to best-practice artifacts using transformation patterns: Method, implementation and use cases (by Vojtěch Svátek, Marek Dudáš and Ondřej Zamazal) is online in Journal of Web Semantics.
  • June 2016: Ondřej Zamazal co-authored an article (first author is Tomáš Kliegr from the DMKD group): LHD 2.0: A text mining approach to typing entities in knowledge graphs, now published online in Journal of Web Semantics.
  • February 2016: For the third time in a row, Marek Dudáš succeeded in getting a PhD research support grant, now for the project ‘Using automated alignment and linguistic transformation in generating semantic data vocabularies’. He will coordinate a team of 3 faculty and 2 more PhD students.
  • February 2016: Successful MSc. thesis defences by Tomáš Hanzal (‘Modeling Events on the Semantic Web’) and Petr Hazuza (‘Vocabulary for Building Accessibility’). Congratulations, and this is not the end of our collaboration!
  • January 2016: An article written by Petr Strossa (having his linguistic rather than semantic hat on) appeared in the Taylor&Francis Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.
  • December 2015: The fifth Know@LOD workshop was accepted to be held within the ESWC 2016 conference in Crete, June 2016.
  • December 2015: The Czech TV showed a news story (on December 2) on the “Mapy bez bariér” (Maps without barriers) project, with Petr Hazuza demonstrating the building accessibility categories on his own flesh. Petr participates in this project as member of the Charter 77 Foundation and transfers there the ongoing results of his MSc thesis on the Building Accessibility Vocabulary.
  • November-December 2015: The first plenary meeting of the OpenBudgets.eu EU project took place in Berlin (November 30 – January 1). Even before (September 26) Jindřich Mynarz co-presented a widely attended talk on “Self-decribing fiscal data” at the Berlin workshop of the SharePSI 2.0 project.
  • November 2015: Marek Dudáš was awarded the Josef Hlávka Prize for outstanding PhD students and young academics, by the Hlávka Foundation. Congratulations!
  • November 2015: Jindřich Mynarz and Václav Zeman talked about Czech DBpedia and DB-quiz at the Czech annual Wikimedia conference (page is in Czech).
  • September-December 2015: Papers have been presented by the group members at: SEMANTiCS (2 demos: of PCFA tool for ontology-augmented procurement data management from LOD2 WP9a, and of ontology path metrics from COSOL), ODBASE (procurement linked data matchmaking, also from LOD2 WP9a), WOP@ISWC (OBM2OWL transformation patterns), VOILA@ISWC (discovering issues in datasets using visual summaries created in enhanced LODSight), OWLED (OBM2OWL transformation using the OBOWLMorph tool), KEOD (ontology richness analysis using path metrics from COSOL), Data&Znalosti (2 student papers, by P. Hazuza and Š. Turečková).
  • October 2015: Vojtěch Svátek moderated the panel on PhD research & industrial cooperation, at the annual national database and knowledge engineering conference, Data&Znalosti (pages are in Czech).
  • September 2015: Out of the 32 poster/demo papers accepted to the SEMANTiCS conference, only six outstanding ones have been selected for the main ACM volume and obtained a Honorary Mention… including both papers authored by SWOE
  • July 2015: The group started to cooperate with the team of the newly started project, “Mapy bez bariér” (Maps without barriers), undertaken by the Charter 77 Foundation. The project (to be formally completed by end 2015) aims to provide machine-readable data on building accessibility for handicapped on the background of common map servers. Petr Hazuza is member of the project team on behalf of the Foundation, and develops the Building Accessibility Vocabulary as part of his MSc thesis. A poster on the project has been presented at the Data&Znalosti conference in October.
  • June 2015: Šárka Turečková defended her MSc thesis focused on DBpedia-powered quizz generator and strategic game (the programs are downloadable). From September she will be working towards another MSc, on Serious Games, at University of Skövde, Sweden.
  • June 2015: Václav Zeman defended his PhD project progress on “Data mining on linked data” (after first year).
  • May 2015: The EU Horizon 2020 project OpenBudgets.eu started. The SWOE team is responsible for the WP related to budget/spending open data modeling.
  • May 2015: The ESWC 2015 conference featured three SWOE-based outcomes: the successful Know@LOD workshop (most attended of all!) with 3rd Linked Data Mining Challenge (LDMC), co-chaired by V. Svátek; the presentation of the LODSight (vocabulary-centric) linked dataset summarizer in the conference demo session, by M. Dudáš, and presentation of OOSP, Online Ontology Set Picker, within the SumPre workshop, by O. Zamazal.
    February 2015: Marek Dudáš has been awarded a new PhD research support project, this time under the name ‘Generation of style variants of semantic data schemas using generalized data visualization’. 4 permanent staff members and 3 other students will collaborate on the project.
  • January 2015: The Czech DBpedia has been significantly enhanced. New extraction using an extended set of mapping rules has been made, new support datasets added, and the visualization interface enhanced.
  • January 2015: Vojtěch Svátek became Editorial Board Member of Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics.
  • January 2015: Jindřich Mynarz spent a month on internship in the Knowledge Engineering group at the University of Göttingen, mainly working on library data RDFization.
  • November 2014: In the Annual Rector’s Award for best publications in 2014, Jindřich Mynarz’s paper from EC-Web conference placed 2nd in the PhD student work category.
  • November 2014 (primarily relates to the DMKD group): The paper on the Linked Hypernym Dataset, by Tomáš Kliegr, has been accepted to Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics (see preprint).
  • November 2014: A full paper (18% acceptance rate) on ‘Roadmapping and Navigating in the Ontology Visualization Landscape’, by Marek Dudáš, Ondřej Zamazal and Vojtěch Svátek, was presented at the EKAW 2014 conference in Linköping.
  • October 2014: Jindřich Mynarz started a 2,5-month PhD internship at the Information Systems Laboratory of the Polytechnic University of Bari (upon invitation from Dr. Tommaso Di Noia). The internship is focused on combining the linked data technology with recommendation/matchmaking techniques
  • October 2014: Ondřej Zamazal co-authored a chapter on multilingual ontology matching in the Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web book.
  • October 2014 (primarily relates to the DMKD group): The Linked Hypernym Dataset (LHD), a large collection of type assignments to RDF entities built by THD tool coeloped by Tomáš Kliegr, has been integrated into the official version of German DBpedia.
  • September 2014: The 13th edition of the Czecho-Slovak knowledge technology conference, Znalosti, was co-chaired by Vojtěch Svátek and Ondřej Zamazal. It was probably the last edition, as from 2015 on, there will be a new conference combining the topics of Znalosti and Datakon (the Czecho-Slovak database conference). This witnesses the constant assimilation of database and knowledge/semantic technologies in the last decade.
  • September 2014: The EU LOD2 Integrated project, where the team led by V. Svátek was responsible for the Public Procurement Linked Data use case, was concluded by a successful final review. The rating of the project eventually was ‘Excellent Progress’ (i.e., the best possible). The results of the project are summarized in the book Linked Open Data – Creating Knowledge Out of Interlinked Data published by Springer; two chapters are co-authored by SWOE members: Ondřej Zamazal, Vojtěch Svátek and Jindřich Mynarz (plus Milan Dojchinovski from the DMKD group).
  • August 2014: Two papers by the SWOE team were presented at the EC-Web 2014 conference in Munich and appear in the Springer LNBIP volume: a full paper (24% acceptance rate) by Marek Dudáš et al., and a short paper by Jindřich Mynarz.
  • July 2014: Article on Ontology alignment design patterns, co-autored by O. Zamazal, was published in Springer’s Knowledge and Information Systems (impact factor 2.6)
  • June 2014: The Linked data support for filing public contracts article, co-authored by Jindřich Mynarz and Vojtěch Svátek, was published in Elsevier’s J. Computers in Industry (impact factor 1.7).
  • May 2014: Vojtěch Svátek co-chaired the LOD track at the ESWC 2014 conference (Anissaras, Crete), plus the collocated Know@LOD workshop.
  • April 2014: Czech DBpedia, maintained by Václav Zeman, is online.
  • March 2014: Marek Dudáš has been awarded a PhD research support project (as best rated proposal within the faculty), under the name ‘Semantic web data visualization exploiting the ontological schema structure’.
  • January 2014: Ondřej Zamazal succeeded, in a sharp competition, in obtaining a 3-year (2014-2016) post-doctoral project from the Czech Science Foundation: ‘COSOL – Categorization of Ontologies in Support of Ontology Life Cycle’.
  • January 2014: The SharePSI 2.0 European network, focused on the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector, started. A joint group, led by colleagues from the Dept. of Information Technology (but with participation of SWOE, via Jindřich Mynarz) is one of the partners.