LARC Seminar on Ontologies and Information Extraction

Speakers:	Fabian M. SUCHANEK Leader Otto Hahn Research Group Max-Planck Institute for Informatics	Date: Time: Venue:	4 April 2013 (Thursday) 4:00pm - 6:00pm Seminar Room 3.1, Level 3 School of Information Systems Singapore Management University 80 Stamford Road Singapore 178902 We look forward to seeing you at this research seminar. For SMU Community: For External Visitors:
	Nicoleta PREDA Associate Professor University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

The Ontologies Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics by Fabian M. SUCHANEK

Abstract

In this talk, I will present the newly founded research group "Ontologies" at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Its main areas of research are Information Extraction for Ontology construction, ontology matching, rule mining in ontologies, and provenance. I will present recent advances in these areas, and future plans.

About the speaker

Fabian M. SUCHANEK is the leader of the Otto Hahn Research Group "Ontologies" at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. He obtained his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Gerhard Weikum. In his thesis, Fabian developed inter alia the YAGO-Ontology, one of the largest public ontologies. The thesis earned him a honorable mention of the SIGMOD dissertation award, and the original paper on YAGO has more than 700 citations. YAGO gave rise to the YAGO-NAGA project, on which more than a dozen researchers work on key questions of semantics. Fabian was also a postdoc at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley (reporting to Rakesh Agrawal) and at INRIA Saclay/France (reporting to Serge Abiteboul). Fabian taught classes on the Semantic Web, Information Extraction and Knowledge Representation in Paris and in Senegal. He has published around 30 scientific articles, among others at ISWC, VLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, CIKM, ICDE, and SIGIR.

SUSIE: Search Using Services and Information Extraction by Nicoleta PREDA

Abstract

The presentation will introduce our solution for handling asymmetric APIs in data integration systems dealing with views with limited access patterns. This problem is inherent to any such query answering system.

Huge databases such as Amazon, Last.fm, and isbndb implement Web service interfaces that give access to timely and highquality information. However, the API of a Web service restricts the types of queries that the service can answer. As a result, many queries has are untractable when the budget of calls is limited. For example, there are Web services that allow asking for the awards of a given person, but not for all persons who have won a given award. This poses a problem, because if a user wants to know who won a certain award, then we cannot use efficiently the Web service to answer the query – even though the data is available at the source. This asymmetry is particularly problematic if the service is part of a Web service orchestration plan.

We propose to use on-the-fly information extraction to collect values that can be used as parameter bindings for the Web service. We show how this idea can be integrated into a Web service orchestration system and we present experimental that demonstrate the practical viability and good performance of our approach.

About the speaker

Nicoleta PREDA is an Associate Professor at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ). She obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from Université Paris-Sud in 2008 studying under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Serge Abiteboul and Dr. Ioana Manolescu and her B.Sc. from the Computer Science Department at the University "Politechnica of Bucarest" Romania in 2003. Before joining the UVSQ in 2010 she was a post-doctoral researcher in the database group led by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany. Her research interests include answering querying using Web Services, distributed indexing and querying large repositories of semi-structured data in distributed settings.