Elsevier Announces Winners Semantic Web Challenge

Challenge applies semantic web techniques to build online end-user applications

New York, 14 November 2011 – Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the winners of the  Semantic Web Challenge. Participants in the Challenge applied semantic web techniques in building online end-user applications that integrate, combine and deduce information needed to assist users in performing tasks. The Challenge took place at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany, from October 23-27, 2011.

The 2011 Semantic Web Challenge, sponsored by Elsevier, was co-chaired by Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer of the Free University Berlin and Dr. Diana Maynard of the University of Sheffield, and consisted of two tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. . Both Challenges were open to researchers from corporations as well as academic researchers. A jury of academic and industrial experts determined the winners. The awards consisted of cash prizes exceeding 2,500 Euros in total.

Ten participants competed in the Open Track which showcased how the use of the semantic web can process low-value real world data sources into higher value ones. Five competitors participated in the Billions Triples Track. The latter track required participants to make use of a specific, very large data set provided by the organizers.

Winners include:

• First Prize Open Track:  BOTTARI; Location based Social Media Analysis with Semantic Web , by the multidisciplinary team of Irene Celino, Daniele Dell'Aglio, Emanuele Della Valle, Marco Balduini, Yi Huang, Tony Lee, Seon-Ho Kim, and Volker Tresp. This winning application combines local views with emotive analysis of live streaming twitter and blog posts to give the end user a new augmented reality of the local Korean dining scene.
• Billion Triples Winner:  SchemEX — Web-Scale Indexed Schema Extraction of Linked Open Data by Mathias Konrath, Thomas Gottron, and Ansgar Scherp. They were awarded the prize for the design of a smart index generation algorithm which they successfully applied to build a very concise lookup index for the Billion Triples data set.
• Second Prize Open Track: seevl: mining music connections to bring context, search and discovery to the music you like by Alexandre Passant. This entry combines multiple sources and knowledge structures, and delivers real world value add information to YouTube music videos through its Google Chrome plug-in.
• Honourable Mention Open Track:  The Linked Sensor Middleware — Connecting the real world and the SemanticWeb by Danh Le-Phuoc, Hoan Nguyen Mau Quoc, Josiane Xavier Parreira, and Manfred Hauswirth. Their application uses a large number of streaming real world sensor data sources, mapping them into RDF, and providing an integrated live view on the data.

"The winners of this year's Open Track have demonstrated tools which showcase the results of a truly international research project, bringing together many different kinds of expertise from researchers in both Europe and Asia" commented Prof. Dr. Bizer and Dr. Maynard. "It has also been encouraging to see a rise in the number of submissions in the Billion Triples Track in the last few years, demonstrating our increased ability as a community to process massive volumes of data.”

"It has been a great honor to support the Semantic Web Challenge to help showcase what the semantic web community can achieve,” said Sweitze Roffel, Publisher at Elsevier. “Having seen the field mature for nearly a decade, I was particularly struck by the notion that some of this year’s contestants not only showcase their highly interesting scientific work, but are also, in fact, new internet start-up companies. By truly bringing advances from academia into industry we can demonstrate the value of research done by the semantic web community for society at large. Whilst I’d like to congratulate all this year's participants on a great challenge, I am already curious what next year could bring as there is so much more exiting work to be showcased.”

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