The presentation aims to emphasize the need for more applications and prototypes in the area of the Semantic Web that will showcase the various research findings and technologies.

1. Semantic Web in the
Plateau of Productivity
Ioannis Stavrakantonakis
27.06.2015

2. :)
I take no responsibility for any harm or damage
caused to any one because of the information
provided in this presentation.

3. Plateau?

4. Gartner’s hype cycle

5. Morphology of Plateau
• Research to bridge the gap between theory
and application.
• Real world application needs could be
interesting research directions.
• Expectations are higher than used to -
evaluation of the added value to the status
quo.

6. Plateau territories
Government
Academia
Industry

7. Government
- Neelie Kroes, June 2nd 2015
“We should embrace change, because we have to.
Our future will be based on how we are dealing with change.”

8. Government
• Exposing (Linked) Open Data
- data.gv.at
- open-data.europa.eu/en/data/
- data.gov
• Funding research projects

9. Open Data

10. Academia
University of Innsbruck

11. Academia
• Research projects
• Research projects with the industry (mainly SMEs)
funded by governmental schemes
• Courses on Semantic Web
• Conferences
(ESWC, ISWC, WWW, SEMANTiCS, etc.)
• PhD theses

12. ODINE
(Open Data Incubator Europe)
“ODINE will provide an accelerator programme for
SMEs and startups to establish business in open
data related area.”
• up to €100,000 per company
• networking with VCs, angel investors, business
mentors
opendataincubator.eu

13. Courses
• University Courses on-campus
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC):
Knowledge Engineering with Semantic Web
Technologies 2015, by Harald Sack,
open.hpi.de/courses/semanticweb2015

14. PhD Theses
• Serendipitous Web Applications through Semantic
Hypermedia. Ruben Verborgh, 2014
• Leveraging The Consumption of Linguistic Open
Data for Educational Purposes. Antonio J. Roa-Valverde,
2015
• SUMMA: A Common API for Linked Data Entity
Summaries. Andreas Thalhammer, candidate
• Leveraging Websites to APIs using Semantics. Ioannis
Stavrakantonakis, candidate

15. Serendipitous Web Applications
through Semantic Hypermedia
“… to enable a new generation of intelligent Web
clients through hypermedia and semantics, enabling a
more serendipitous Web…”
“How can semantic hypermedia improve the
serendipitous reuse of data and applications on the
Web?”
Ruben Verborgh

16. Leveraging the consumption of Linguistic
Open Data for Educational Purposes
“we exploit the practical dimension of Wiktionary”
“…with our educational use case, we show how our
research can be put in practice in the context of a
mobile application designed exclusively for supporting
users in the acquisition of new foreign second
language (FSL) vocabulary.”
Antonio J. Roa-Valverde

17. A Common API for Linked
Data Entity Summaries
“We introduce SUMMA, an API definition that enables
to decouple generation and presentation of
summaries. It enables multiple consumers to
retrieve summaries from multiple providers in a
unified and lightweight way.”
Andreas Thalhammer

18. Leveraging Websites to APIs
using Semantics
“helps to identify the most appropriate set of LOV
vocabulary terms for a given webpage by leveraging
the existing dynamics within the LOV graph and the
usage patterns in the LOD cloud.”
“…an online service endpoint, which can be used by
developers and ontology engineers…”
Ioannis Stavrakantonakis

19. Industry
Google data center water pipes

20. Industry
• BBC
(linked data platform, bbc.co.uk/things)
• Google
(schema.org, knowledge graph, email markup)
• Facebook
(graph search, FAIR)

21. BBC
• Dynamic Semantic Publishing Framework provided
by Ontotext
- 800+ Dynamic pages generated through SPARQL
for the World Cup 2010
- 2 million page requests/day
• Linked Data Platform

22. BBC Things

23. Knowledge graph

24. Google Email markup
“Unlock the power of your emails with schema.org”
JSON-LD + schema.org actions
e.g. schema.org/RsvpAction
that “extends” the
schema.org/Action

25. schema.org
• Contract with the developers about the
understandable metadata terms on the published
web content
• Uptake: 17% of 15M domains according to the
Common Web Crawler, Q4 2014
• Misuse of the vocabulary of some type >50%,
Meusel et al. at ESWC 2015

26. Facebook AI Research
“…we plan to work openly with and invest in the AI
research community in France, the EU, and beyond as
we strive to make meaningful progress in these fields. We
have a collaborative agreement in place with INRIA…”
research.facebook.com/ai/

27. Facebook + INRIA
Best way to bridge the gap is to bring the two sides
under the same roof.
result: Facebook AI Research, Paris

28. Outlook

29. Problems
• Open Data portals with SPARQL endpoints. How
many developers are able to use that?
• Is there enough prototypes using Semantic
Technologies and/or consuming Open Data?
• Educate developers.

30. What to do?
• Find broken parts in the funnel and fix them,
build a product, PhD, MSc, push a solution on github.
• Encourage research directions with practical
applications.
• Providing data dumps or SPARQL endpoints does not
help neither the Semantic Web per se, nor the real
Web.
• Publish MOOC online courses.

31. What else to do?
• Understand and promote the realistic added value
of the Semantic Web technologies.
• Applied research.
• Solutions that push further the real world through
the Web.
• Envision the next step for the Web.

32. What do you think?

33. –Yoda, Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

34. Photo credits
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
• http://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2015/6/415345/innovation-lecture-2015-
by-neelie-kroes-on-change
• http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech