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About Web & Media @ CS-VU

The work of the Web & Media group on the Semantic Culture Web has received world-wide attention and recognition. The MultimediaN E-Culture cultural search engine, developed in cooperation with UvA, CWI and a range of cultural-heritage institutions, won the Semantic Web Challenge 2006 in Athens (Georgia). This work now forms the heart of the research demonstrator for Europeana, the EU Culture portal launched in November 2008. The Web & Media group is a leading partner in the research projects for further development of Europeana, starting in 2009. The CHIP demonstrator (personalized museum tour, with Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) won the third prize at the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge. We are also involved in projects concerning annotation and access to TV archives (CHOICE, MuNCH, PrestoPRIME), personalized integration of TV and Web content (NoTube), historical events (Agora) and information integration for e-science (VL-e) and for maritine safety and security (Poseidon).

The Web & Media group forms together with the Knowledge Representation group (headed by Frank van Harmelen) the VU Semantic Web group. We focus on distributed, Web-based multimedia collections. The notion of ontology as a shared information model in the new distributed digital universum is a key element in this research. Research topics include knowledge and ontology engineering, semantic enrichment, semantic search, interactive and personalized access, visualization paradigms, and distributed architectures. We are interested in both the "product" aspects (the resulting languages, ontologies, alignments and patterns) as well as the "process" aspects, including practical 'how-to-do-it' guidelines as well as support tools.

Amsterdam is a nice environment for collaborative research both within the VU (e.g. with the groups of Wan Fokkink, Piek Vossen and Susan Legène) and with the University of Amsterdam and CWI. We have long-term research relationships with major Dutch cultural heritage institutions, such as The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the National Library, Naturalis, ICN and DEN.

We are active participants in W3C activities. Guus Schreiber co-chairs the Semantic Web Deployment working group (SKOS and RDFa) and is a former co-chair of the OWL working group. Brickley co-chairs the Semantic Web interest group and the newly formed Social Web incubator group. We actively develop open-source software, in particular Jan Wielemaker's popular SWI-Prolog (which includes an elaborate Semantic Web library) and ClioPatria (server software for storing, accessing and visualizing large RDF triple stores, developed together with CWI).

Upcoming events

Past events

• 29-30 October 2009: UDC conference, The Hague (Dan and Antoine invited speakers)
• 25-29 October 2009: 8th International Semantic Web Conference, Washington DC
• 20 October 2009: Honorary Doctorate Sir Tim Berners-Lee, VU Amsterdam
• 12-16 October 2009: Dublin Core conference, Seoul (Antoine invited speaker)
• 1-4 September 2009: 5th Internation Conference on Knowledge Capture, Redondo Beach, CA (Anna presents full paper)
• 22-26 June 2009: Semantic Week, Amsterdam (Jacco invited speaker)
• 23-26 June 2009: 11th Protege Conference, Amsterdam (Frank van Harmelen and Guus Schreiber are invited speakers)
• 15-16 June: KVAN-dagen, Haarlem (Dutch only) Jacco explains why all Dutch archives need the Semantic Web 14-18 June: SemTech 2009 in San José, CA (Lora Aroyo presents NoTube project on European day)
• 12 June 2009: Thesis defense Jan Wielemaker "Logic programming for knowledge-intensive interactive applications", UvA, Amsterdam
• 31 May - 4 June 2009: 6th European Semantic Web Conference (Lora Aroyo Program Chair), Heraklion, Crete
• 17 March 2009: SKOS becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation
• 13 March 2009: Anniversary Web@20 (Dan Brickley in panel), Geneva, Switzerland
• 19 January 2009: Thesis defense Willem van Hage "Evaluating Ontology-Alignment Techniques"