Dieter Fensel (born 10 October 1960, in Nuremberg) is a German researcher in the field of formal languages and the semantic web. He is University Professor at the University of Innsbruck, where he directs the Semantic Technologies Institute Innsbruck (STI Innsbruck), a research center associated with the university.
Fensel studied mathematics, social science and computer science at Berlin, and received his doctorate in economics in 1993, studying under Dr Rudi Studer at the University of Karlsruhe. (Title: Die Wissen-Erfassungs- und Repräsentationssprache KARL). In 1998 he received his habilitation and started work at the Institute for Applied Computer Science and Formal Description Procedures (AIFB), focusing, inter alia, on knowledge management and Formal languages.
Subsequently he worked as an assistant professor at University of Amsterdam, and as a professor at NUI Galway (Ireland) (2003–2006) and at the University of Innsbruck. He was hired by NUI Galway to direct the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI); he resigned this position after a dispute with Science Foundation Ireland over whether he could be reimbursed for chartered aircraft, used to simplify the otherwise-complicated travel connections between Galway and Innsbruck. [1] Since 2003 he has also been the director of DERI Innsbruck, which in December 2007 was renamed to Semantic Technologies Institute Innsbruck (STI Innsbruck). Fensel was the founding director of the Semantic Technology Institute International (STI2). He is one of five founders of seekda spin-off company of STI Innsbruck. [2]
Fensel has published numerous articles in technical periodicals, [3] [4] has been giving keynote speeches [5] and co-organized conferences. He has been and is involved in several national and international research projects such as LarKc, SOA4All and Insemtives.
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.
OIL can be regarded as an ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web. OIL is based on concepts developed in Description Logic (DL) and frame-based systems and is compatible with RDFS.
Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between expressive power and reasoning complexity by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is a former research institute at NUI Galway. It is now part of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Insight was established in 2013 by Science Foundation Ireland with funding of €75m.
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic searches, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps, calendars and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.
The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF and OWL. These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.
Rudi Studer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at KIT, Germany. He served as head of the knowledge management research group at the Institute AIFB and one of the directors of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI). He is a former president of the Semantic Web Science Association, an STI International Fellow, and a member of numerous programme committees and editorial boards. He was one of the inaugural editors-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics, a position he held until 2007. He is a co-author of the "Semantic Wikipedia" proposal which led to the development of Wikidata.
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.
Frank van Harmelen is a Dutch computer scientist and professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was scientific director of the LarKC project (2008-2011), "aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning."
In computing, linked data is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages only for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. Part of the vision of linked data is for the Internet to become a global database.
What you see is what you meant (WYSIWYM) is a text editing interaction technique that emerged from two projects at University of Brighton. It allows users to create abstract knowledge representations such as those required by the Semantic Web using a natural language interface. Natural language understanding (NLU) technology is not employed. Instead, natural language generation (NLG) is used in a highly interactive manner.
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.
In philosophy, a process ontology refers to a universal model of the structure of the world as an ordered wholeness. Such ontologies are fundamental ontologies, in contrast to the so-called applied ontologies. Fundamental ontologies do not claim to be accessible to any empirical proof in itself, but to be a structural design pattern, out of which empirical phenomena can be explained and put together consistently. Throughout Western history, the dominating fundamental ontology is the so-called substance theory. However, fundamental process ontologies are becoming more important in recent times, because the progress in the discovery of the foundations of physics spurred the development of a basic concept able to integrate such boundary notions as "energy," "object", and those of the physical dimensions of space and time.
Semantic Technology Institute (STI) International is an association of global experts in semantics and services, located in Austria. It has members mostly from Europe, but also from South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.
John Domingue is a British academic, and Professor of Computer Science at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University in Milton Keynes, and researcher in the semantic web, linked data, services, blockchain and education.
The German software company fluid Operations AG (fluidOps) was founded in 2008 and specializes in cloud management and semantic technology. Fluid Operations' product portfolio includes the semantic integration platform Information Workbench and eCloudManager. Additionally, fluid Operations offers an open source software, the VMFS Driver. In 2018, fluidOps joined Veritas Technologies to empower organizations to discover the Truth in Information.
Semantic Web - Interoperability, Usability, Applicability is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by IOS Press. It was established in 2010 and covers the foundations and applications of semantic web technologies and linked data. The journal uses an open peer-review process. The journal publishes its metadata online in the form of Linked Data and provides scientometrics such as the geographic distribution of authors, citation networks, trends in research topics over time, and so forth. The editors-in-chief are Pascal Hitzler and Krzysztof Janowicz.
The Semantic Web Services Language (SWSL) is a general-purpose logical language for specifying Semantic Web Services Ontologies (SWSOs), as well as individual Web services. The Semantic Web Services Language (SWSL) describes the syntax elements of SWSL and its semantic and semantic foundations. It can be used with the underlying language and network structure of Semantic Web Services. Syntactically, first-order logic is a subset of the Semantic Web Services Language (SWSL).
Pascal Hitzler is a German American computer scientist specializing in Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence. He is endowed Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering Chair and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Kansas State University, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal and the IOS Press book series Studies on the Semantic Web.
Zdenko "Denny" Vrandečić is a Croatian computer scientist. He was a co-developer of Semantic MediaWiki and Wikidata, the lead developer of the Wikifunctions project, and an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation as a Head of Special Projects, Structured Content. He published modules for the German role-playing game The Dark Eye.