Semantic Computing

A new national project funded by Tekes 22 Finnish companies and public organizations starts in 2012.
The project is lead and research is done by the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) of Aalto University and Univeristy of Helsinki.
More information is available at the project home page.

Master’s thesis “Easily Integrable Ontology Services on the Semantic Web” by Jouni Tuominen, a doctoral candidate in SeCo, was awarded an annual master’s thesis award, organized by the Finnish Society for Computer Science. The thesis is based on the research on the ONKI Ontology Service.

More information:

Press release (in Finnish)

Master’s thesis “Helppokytkentäiset ontologiapalvelut semanttisessa webissä” (in Finnish)

ONKI Ontology Service

The Finnish Society for Computer Science

SmartMuseum application, developed in the FP7 SmartMuseum project by SeCo and seven international partners, got the World Summit Award (WSA) Mobile 2011 in category ‘M-turism and Culture’, organized by the United Nations. There were 430 participanting applications in the global final, selected from about 100 national competitions in different countries. The winners were presented in the WSA gala in Abu Dhabi on December 7th, 2010.

More information:

SmartMuseum home page, see e.g. the videos on the
front page illustrating the system.

Home page of World Summit Award

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Press Release of Aalto University (in Finnish)

Aalto-yliopiston semanttisen webin tutkijat voittivat World Summit Award Mobile 2010 –kilpailun SmartMuseum -järjestelmällä

Aalto-yliopiston ja kuuden muun yliopiston ja tutkimuspartnerin kehittämä SmartMuseum-järjestelmä on voittanut kansainvälisen World Summit Award Mobile 2010 palkinnon. Työ valittiin parhaaksi kategoriassa ”M-turism and Culture” 430 ehdokkaan joukosta, jotka nimitettiin lähes sadan eri valtion osakilpailuissa.

SmartMuseum -järjestelmän ideana on tarjota museossa kävijälle tietoa ja opastusta kokoelmakohteista älykkäästi ja personoidusti paikan päällä. Voittoisan pilottijärjestelmän sisällöt ovat peräisin Firenzen tieteenhistoriallista Galileo museosta ja Maltan taidemuseosta. SmartMuseum-järjestelmän älykkyys perustuu semanttisen webin teknologioihin ja Kulttuurisampo.fi -portaalin haku- ja suosittelujärjestelmiin. Sisällöntuotannossa on hyödynnetty kansallista ontologiakirjastopalvelua.

Suomen osuus tutkimus- ja kehitystyöstä tehtiin Aalto-yliopiston mediatekniikan laitoksen Semanttisen laskennan tutkimusryhmässä, joka oli lokakuussa voittoisa myös Apps4Finland – Doing Good with Open Data -kilpailussa semanttisella DataSuomi-järjestelmällä.

- Molempien palkintojen taustalla on vuodesta 2003 tutkimusryhmässämme johdettu laaja FinnONTO-hanke kansallisen semanttisen webin infrastruktuurin kehittämiseksi maahamme. Sen tutkimustuloksia ja uusia työkaluja voidaan nyt hyödyntää nopeasti ja kehittää edelleen uusissa sovelluksissa, kertoo hankkeen johtaja Eero Hyvönen.

World Summit Award on Yhdistyneiden kansakuntien ja sen Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID) -järjestön lippulaivahanke, joka järjestetään yhteistyössä UNESCO:n ja UNIDO:n kanssa. Palkinnot jaettiin Abu Dhabissa 6.12. pidetyssä kansainvälisessä WSA Mobile -gaalassa.

Lisätietoja

SmartMuseum-projekti: http://www.smartmuseum.eu/
World Summit Award Mobile: http://www.wsa-mobile.org/
Semanttisen laskennan tutkimusryhmä SeCo: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/

Eero Hyvönen, professori
Aalto-yliopisto, mediatekniikan laitos
Semanttisen laskennan tutkimusryhmä SeCo
050 3841618, eero.hyvonen@tkk.fi

(väitöstiedote suomeksi)

Please be welcome to Eetu Mäkelä’s public defence of his doctoral thesis on View-Based User Interfaces for the Semantic Web. The defence will take place on Friday, the 26th of November, at 12 noon at the TUAS Building (Otaniementie 17, Espoo), Auditorium TU2. The defence will also be broadcast live over the internet here.

The content of the dissertation to be presented deals with the benefits that may be gained from publishing data using Semantic Web techniques, and how these benefits can be realized. Particular emphasis is placed on how originally varied and heterogeneous data can be linked to each other, and what new functionalities this enables for an end-user. Also discussed are how these functionalities are best implemented in user interfaces and system architecture.

The work in the thesis focuses mostly on publishing cultural heritage information in national level integrated portals. During the work two such were produced: www.museosuomi.fi and www.kulttuurisampo.fi. Of these, MuseumFinland was awarded both the Semantic Web Challenge award of the international research community as well as the Finnish prime minister’s honorary mention for the most innovative web application of the year. Other content areas discussed are e-Health, e-Government, e-Learning and e-Commerce.

As examples of the user interfaces developed during the work, data exploration interfaces were implemented that can answer questions such as “How beard fashions changed in the end of the 19th century?”, “which themes were the most popular in Finnish fiction in the year 2007?”, “what are the most popular colors of peoples’ underwear?” and “how are the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the French emperor Napoleon the first connected to each other?”.

The viewpoint of an information provider is catered for in the section of the thesis discussing production and publishing architectures for Linked Open Data, as well as the problems faced in integrating vastly heterogeneous data.

The dissertation is available for download here (pdf).

Preceding the dissertation, the opponent, professor Lora Aroyo (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will give a guest lecture at the same auditorium at 10:15-11:00 on “User Interaction and Personalization with Semantics”.

Abstract:
In this talk I will present three use cases of how the use of semantics (1) brings added value and (2) introduces new challenges for the user interaction and personalization. The main focus of this research is to investigate how knowledge patterns in Linked Open Data can help in the process of consuming semantically enriched Web content. The three use cases are explored in the context of three projects NoTube (personalized access to TV content using content patterns in Linked Open Data), CHIP (personalized access to enriched museum collections using content patterns in domain ontologies), WAISDA? (interactive tagging game to collect user-generated data and use it for annotation of audio-visual collections). I will also demonstrate some of the prototypes developed for these use cases.

Project links:
http://notube.tv
http://chip-project.org
http://waisda.nl

Short bio:
Lora Aroyo is now an assistant professor at the Web & Media Group, VU University Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Currently she is technical coordinator for the EU Project NoTube, lead researcher for the VU in the EU Project PrestoPrime and for the CATCH project Agora. Previously she was also project coordinator for the CATCH project CHIP. She has written numerous publications in leading conferences and journals the fields of personalization, user modeling and semantic web. She has also been involved in the organizations of various conferences, workshops and journal special issues, most notably as PC Chair for ESWC2009 and ISWC2011, Conference Chair for ESWC2010, and as member of the editorial board of the UMUAI journal and the Semantic Web Journal. Her main research interests are in facilitating personalized access to Web content collections by utilizing Semantic and Social Web technologies for user modelling and recommendations.

The SmartMuseum mobile system demonstrator was finished and demonstrated at the Cultural Heritage Online conference in Florence, Dec 15-16. The first public demonstration of the system took place in Malta at the Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing (SEMAPRO).

The SmartMuseum project homepage contains a video demonstration of the system and as well as other information about the system and research behind it.

The SmartMuseum paper

Innar Liiv, Tanel Tammet, Tuukka Ruotsalo and Alar Kuusik: Personalized Context-aware recommendations in SMARTMUSEUM: Combining Semantics with Statistics. Proceedings of the The Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing (SEMAPRO 2009), IEEE Computer Society, October, 2009. Sliema, Malta.

got the Best Paper award at the Third International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing.

The semantic portal CultureSampo – Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web is released on Sept 25, 2008. The publication event is organized
at the National Museum of Finland. For more information, see
the event home page.

SeCo released the prototype of ‘HealthFinland – Finnish Health Information on the Semantic Web’
at a publication event on
Sept 12, 2008. For more information about this national semantic portal project, and for trying the system yourself, see our HealthFinland home page .