I was visiting Karlsruhe last month to attend the SEMANTiCS 2019 conference, between 9-12 September 2019. It was the largest SEMANTiCS conference in their history, with more than 400 people coming from all over the world to the conference. For me personally, this is a familiar venue, as I was involved (either as authors or organizers) almost every year since 2013.

As usual, the SEMANTiCS Conference is always an exciting combination of researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry, which represented well in the participant list – almost 50-50 between them. You can also see the variety in the number of talks and papers, which are split between industrial and research tracks.

My attendance to SEMANTiCS time is to present two posters from our group at TU Wien from two different projects: SEPSES and SEMCON. I had a 2-minutes talk for both papers at the Minute Madness event on the first day of the main conference, advertising our approaches to the audience.

The first paper from the SEPSES project presents the work on a semantic-based approach to analyze file system activity using log data. This is especially important to support integration and analysis of heterogeneous log files, supporting security experts to deal with the increased threat of data exfiltration in an organization.

Our second paper presents the summary of our work in the SEMCON project, which aims to provide an alternative method for a controlled mechanism for data sharing called “Semantic Container”, a light-weight infrastructure for data provisioning. The approach allows packaging of data into reusable containers, which includes usage policy, semantics of data, and API for data access and usage, while allows data providers to retain a level of control over its usage.

The Conference keynotes provide interesting insights on the present and future of the semantics technologies.

The first Keynote of Michael J. Sullivan from Oracle explains their approach to Hybrid Knowledge Management architecture, combining ontologies and knowledge graphs with data of different types in their platform. The second Keynote, given by Michel Dumontier from Maastricht University, focusing on the importance of FAIR data and services, and how Knowledge Graphs could play a role in that. The third keynote from Shell explains their approach to finding the right information from tons of data with the help of semantic technologies. The last keynote from Valentina Presutti focuses on her research on looking the common sense in the Semantic Web.

In summary, the SEMANTiCS 2019 provides me and all participant with a great event, information exchanges, as well as fresh research ideas and cooperation possibilities, opening up further chances to further our research.

I am happy to announce that our Journal article that I co-authored, entitled “Semantics for Cyber-Physical Systems: A Cross-Domain Perspective”, is accepted in the Semantic Web Journal (SWJ) last Friday [link].

The paper discusses a cross-domain perspective of using Semantic Web Technologies (SWTs) in various Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) settings and use cases, which could be of interest to you and/or your colleagues. If so, feel free to contact us!

Abstract: “Modern life is increasingly made more comfortable, efficient, and sustainable by the smart systems that surround us: smart buildings monitor and adjust temperature levels to achieve occupant comfort while optimizing energy consumption; smart energy grids reconfigure dynamically to make the best use of ad-hoc energy produced by a host of distributed energy producers; smart factories can be reconfigured on the shop-floor to efficiently produce a diverse range of products. These complex systems can only be realized by tightly integrating components in the physical space (sensors, actuators) with advanced software algorithms in the cyber-space, thus creating so-called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Semantic Web technologies (SWT) have seen a natural uptake in several areas based on CPS, given that CPS are data and knowledge intensive while providing advanced functionalities typical of semantics-based intelligent systems. Yet, so far, this uptake has primarily happened within the boundaries of application domains resulting in somewhat disconnected research communities. In this paper, we take a cross-domain perspective by synthesizing our experiences of using SWTs during the engineering and operation of CPSs in smart manufacturing, smart buildings, and smart grids. We discuss use cases that are amenable to the use of SWTs, benefits and challenges of using these technologies in the CPS lifecycle as well as emerging future trends. While non-exhaustive, our paper aims at opening up a dialog between these fields and at putting the foundation for a research area on semantics in CPS.“

Hi Again! Happy to announce that our demo paper entitled “Semantic Containers for Data Mobility: A Seismic Activity Use Case“, together with Peb, Elmar, Christoph, and Edi is now accepted as a demo paper at SEMANTiCS 2019. This is the result of the SEMCON project, funded by FFG.

All material from the SEMCON Project, including those listed in the paper, is available on SEMCON’s GitHub page. Please take a look over there if you’re interested in the technical details!

We expect that the demo would be a basis for further collaboration in using/extending/applying SEMCON approach for verifiable data exchange between users! Looking forward to discuss SEMCON with you at SEMANTiCS 2019 in Karlsruhe!

 

Happy to announce that our paper entitled “The SEPSES knowledge graph: An integrated resource for cybersecurity” is now accepted as ISWC Resource paper! This is actually my first ISWC paper, so I rejoice it very much! 😉

After the last year’s acceptance of our ESWC paper (together with Marta and others from the STAR project), I am very much looking forward to having a taste of getting an ISWC paper. Luckily, with the SEPSES project team (Elmar, Andreas, and Kabul), I am getting there!

Access to all resources from this paper is available on the SEPSES website – please contact us for potential collaborations!

While we aim for the main track, we are happy to announce that our paper entitled “Finding Non-compliances with Declarative Process Constraints Through Semantic Technologies” is accepted as CAiSE Forum paper!

We published the resource for constraint checks on Process Mining rules (which we called SHACLARE – SHACL for declARE rules) here. Hopefully, it will lead to a lot more publications in the future, 😉