Workshops

Organisers: Raúl García-Castro, John Davies, Grigoris Antoniou and Carolina Fortuna

The concept of digital twin, as a virtual replica of a physical entity, has gained traction recently in a range of domains such as industry, construction, energy, health or transport. Digital Twins can be used to view the status of the twinned physical object, without the need to interrogate the object itself. The digital twin can be queried by other software without the need to query the device itself thus relieving pressure on devices, which typically have very limited computational capabilities. Digital twins can also be used for monitoring and diagnostics to optimize device performance without impacting on the physical device.

Digital twins require unambiguous descriptions of both the entity and its digital counterpart, as well as the ability to integrate data from heterogeneous sources of information (including real-time data) and to interact with the physical world. Given these requirements, semantic technologies will play a significant role in bringing digital twins to reality.

The aims of the SeDIT workshop are twofold. Firstly, to initiate discussion about current trends and future challenges of semantic digital twins. Secondly, to support communication and collaboration with the goal of aligning the various efforts within the community and accelerating innovation in all the associated fields.

Website: https://sedit.linkeddata.es

Organisers: Mehwish Alam, Davide Buscaldi, Michael Cochez, Francesco Osborne, Diego Reforgiato and Harald Sack

Over the past years there has been a rapid growth in the use and the importance of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) along with their application to many important tasks. KGs are large networks of real-world entities described in terms of their semantic types and their relationships to each other. On the other hand, Deep Learning methods have also become an important area of research, achieving some important breakthrough in various research fields, especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Image Recognition.

In order to pursue more advanced methodologies, it has become critical that the communities related to Deep Learning, Knowledge Graphs, and NLP join their forces in order to develop more effective algorithms and applications. This workshop, in the wake of other similar efforts at previous Semantic Web conferences such as ESWC2018 as DL4KGs and ISWC2018, ESWC2019, aims to reinforce the relationships between these communities and foster inter-disciplinary research in the areas of KG, Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing.

Website: https://alammehwish.github.io/dl4kg_eswc_2020

Organisers: Hajira Jabeen, Damien Graux, Gezim Sejdiu, George Papadakis and Jens Lehmann

The second workshop on Large Scale RDF Analytics (LASCAR) invites papers and posters related to the challenges and solutions to deal with the enormous growth of linked data. LASCAR targets the advancements in large scale and distributed processing for the semantic web technologies. We will particularly welcome research efforts exploring the use of generic big data frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, or specialized libraries like Giraph, Tinkerpop, SparkSQL etc. in Semantic Web technologies. The goal is to demonstrate the use of existing frameworks and libraries to exploit Knowledge Graph processing and to discuss the solutions to the challenges and issues arising therein. Moreover, we will organize a related talk by an expert speaker, and also arrange a panel discussion among experts and scientists working in the area of distributed semantic analytics. LASCAR targets a range of research topics covering large scale processing of Knowledge Graphs, like querying, inference, and analytics, therefore we expect a wider audience interested in attending the workshop.

Website: http://lascar.sda.tech/

Organisers: Alessandro Adamou, Enrico Daga and Albert Meroño-Peñuela

The WHiSe workshop series aims at strengthening communication between scholars in the Digital Humanities and Semantic Web communities. It debuted at ESWC 2016 and remained co-located with the largest international conferences in Semantic Web research, resulting in 23 published papers across two proceedings volumes. Many of these papers have presented mature technologies, adoption stories and contributions to a harmonic ecosystem for Semantic data-intensive technologies in the Humanities. WHiSe III continues the tradition and also explores the potential for novel SW questions emerging from the needs of humanists and a reflection on their processes.

Website: http://whise.cc/2020/

Organisers: Konstantin Todorov, Stefan Dietze and Pavlos Fafalios

Expressing opinions and interacting with others on the Web has led to the production of an abundance of Online Discourse Data (ODD), such as claims and viewpoints on controversial topics, their sources and contexts (events, entities). ODD are a valuable source of insights for studies into misinformation spread, bias reinforcement, echo chambers or political agenda setting. While knowledge graphs (KGs) promise to provide the key to a Web of structured information, they are mainly focused on facts without keeping track of the diversity, connection or temporal evolution of ODD. As opposed to facts, claims are inherently more complex. Their interpretation strongly depends on the context and a variety of intentional or unintended meanings, where terminology and conceptual understandings strongly diverge across communities from computational social science, to argumentation mining, fact-checking, or viewpoint/stance detection. This workshop aims at strengthening the relations between the aforementioned communities providing a forum for shared works on the modeling, extraction and analysis of ODD from diverse fields. It will address the need for a shared understanding and structured knowledge about ODD in order to enable machine-interpretation, discoverability and reuse, in support of scientific or journalistic studies into the analysis of societal debates on the Web.

Website: https://knod2020.wordpress.com/

Organisers: Michail Feidakis, John Soldatos, Babak Akhgar, George Meditskos and Stefanos Vrochidis

Internet of Things (IoT) platforms have received a significant amount of attention due to the simplicity and efficiency they bring in creating business value, linking the IoT endpoints to applications and analytics. They are essentially the linchpin in a holistic IoT solution because they enable data generated at endpoints to be collected and analysed, spawning the growth of big data analytics and applications. The rapid increase in the number of network-enabled devices and sensors deployed in physical environments, enriched with information processing capabilities, has allowed the interconnection of people, processes, data and devices, offering enormous potential across many sectors. The large societal and personal impact of pervasive, mobile and interconnected entities in the web, is already apparent in health, smart factories and cities, security, environmental, agriculture and retail applications. For example, in smart cities, IoT technologies are used from collecting and interrogating city-centre parking metrics, to the use of so-called ‘smart’ street lighting to generate efficiencies. One of the most compelling, however, use case is the technology’s use in a safety context. In this context, the challenge is to use humans and devices interchangeably to achieve operational goals and respond to emergency situations, such as natural disasters, vandalisms or missing people in overcrowded places. At the same time, pervasive technologies and eHealth systems seem to offer a promising solution for accessible and affordable self-management of health problems, both in living and working environments. Wearable devices and ambient sensors can be transformed into meaningful lifestyle and work-style monitoring tools, extracting personalised partners and detecting problematic situations to foster a healthy and safe home and working environments.

This workshop provides the opportunity to discuss specific research and technical topics in applying IoT technologies in pervasive environments, with a special emphasis on safety in high-risk environments, such as in the healthcare domain (home care and occupational health), public events, food supply chain, energy industries, intelligent transportation, and building & infrastructure management. The main objective is to stimulate and foster active exchange and interaction on formal ontologies for the semantic enrichment, representation and linking of sensor data, events and resources, context-aware and real-time discovery, reasoning, interpretation and composition of data sources for building high-level applications.

Website: https://mklab.iti.gr/iot4safe

Organisers: Elena Demidova, Sherzod Hakimov, Jane Winters and Marko Tadić

The modern society faces an unprecedented number of events that impact countries, communities and economies around the globe, across language, country and community borders. Recent examples include sudden or unexpected events such as terrorist attacks, political shake-ups such as Brexit as well as longer ongoing and evolving topics such as the migration crisis in Europe that regularly spawn events of global importance affecting local communities. These developments result in a vast amount of event-centric, multilingual information available from heterogeneously sources on the Web, in the Web of Data, within Knowledge Graphs, in social media, inside Web archives and in the news sources. Such event-centric information differs across sources, languages and communities, potentially reflecting community-specific aspects, opinions, sentiments and bias.

The theme of the CLEOPATRA workshop – event-centric multilingual analytics – includes a variety of interdisciplinary challenges related to analysis, interaction with and interpretation of vast amounts of event-centric textual, semantic and visual information in multiple languages originating from different communities. The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the development of methods for analysing event-centric multilingual information.

The CLEOPATRA workshop will be a highly interactive event, which will include keynotes by experts in the relevant fields, poster and demo session, research presentations and discussion.

Website: http://cleopatra-workshop.l3s.uni-hannover.de/