Workshops & Tutorials

Tutorial: Constructing Question Answering Systems over Knowledge Graphs

Organisers: Dennis Diefenbach, Andreas Both and Pierre Maret

Knowledge Graphs are designed to be easily consumed by machines, but they are not easily accessible by end-users. Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is seen as a technology able to bridge the gap between end-users and Knowledge Graphs. In the last years a lot of research was carried out to solve the problem of QA over KGs, but constructing a QA system over a new KG for non-expert users is still not easy.

The aim of this tutorial is to address this issue. We will show how recently developed technologies, like QAnswer and Qanary, allow constructing, customizing, evaluating, and optimizing QA systems on RDF datasets using a lightweight approach.

Website: https://qanswer.github.io/QA-ESWC2020/

Tutorial: Entity Summarization in Knowledge Graphs: Algorithms, Evaluation, and Applications

Organisers: Gong Cheng, Kalpa Gunaratna and Evgeny Kharlamov

The concise representation format and graph nature of knowledge graphs have resulted in creating many novel Web applications and enhancing existing ones. However, in a knowledge graph, dozens or hundreds of facts describing an entity could exceed the capacity of a typical user interface and overload users with excessive amounts of information. This has motivated fruitful research on entity summarization---automated generation of compact summaries for entities to satisfy users' information needs efficiently and effectively. Over the recent years, researchers have contributed to this problem by proposing approaches ranging from pure ranking and mining techniques to machine and deep learning techniques. The state of the art has continuously improved and at the same time made it harder for the community and new comers to the problem to keep up with the recent and old contributions in the space. Moreover, even though knowledge graphs are becoming popular among academia and industry, there is no effort to date to educate and discuss on recent trends and basic building blocks of this problem domain. This tutorial specifically aims to fill this gap.

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/entity-summarization-tutorials/eswc2020

Tutorial: Example-based Exploration: Exploring Knowledge through Examples

Organisers: Matteo Lissandrini, Davide Mottin, Themis Palpanas and Yannis Velegrakis

Exploration is one of the primordial ways to accrue knowledge about the world and its nature. As we accumulate, mostly automatically, data at unprecedented volumes and speed, our datasets have become complex and hard to understand. In this context, exploratory search provides a handy tool for progressively gather the necessary knowledge by starting from a tentative query that can provide cues about the next queries to issue.

An exploratory query should be simple enough to avoid complicate declarative languages (such as SQL or SPARQL) and convoluted mechanism, and at the same time retain the flexibility and expressiveness required to express complex information needs. Recently, we have witnessed a rediscovery of the so called example-based methods, in which the user, or the analyst circumvent query languages by using examples as input.

This shift in semantics has led to a number of methods receiving as query a set of example members of the answer set. The search system then infers the entire answer set based on the given examples and any additional information provided by the underlying database. In this tutorial, we present an excursus over the main example-based methods for exploratory analysis. We show how different data types require different techniques, and present algorithms that are specifically designed for relational, textual, and graph data. We conclude by providing a unifying view of this query-paradigm and identify new exciting research directions.

Website: https://data-exploration.ml/eswc2020.html

Tutorial: Modular Ontology Engineering with CoModIDE

Organisers: Karl Hammar and Cogan Shimizu

Modular ontology engineering using ontology design patterns enables non-experts to develop ontologies with reasonable degree of correctness and efficiency. However, the tooling required to fully realize this approach to ontology development, has long been lacking; consequently, comparatively few ontology engineering projects have in fact been carried out using this promising approach. The authors have developed what we believe is the first graphical drag-and-drop-based tool for modular pattern-based ontology engineering, CoModIDE. We will during this tutorial demonstrate CoModIDE and teach the participants to use it. This tutorial is aimed at both novice ontologists (who may directly benefit from having this easy-to-use and freely available tool available, in their own modelling work), and more experienced ontology engineering researchers (who may find the tool useful as an aid in method development and evaluation, or as a teaching aid when introducing ontology engineering to less experienced colleagues).

Website: https://comodide.com/tutorial.html

Workshop: International Workshop on Semantic Digital Twins

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

Workshop: Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG)

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

Workshop: Workshop on Large Scale RDF Analytics LASCAR II

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/

Workshop: Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic web (WHiSe III)

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/

Workshop: IoT infrastructures for safety in pervasive environments

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

Workshop: Workshop on Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics (CLEOPATRA)

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/

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