Elsevier Sponsors 2012 Semantic Web Challenge

AMSTERDAM, November 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Winners Announced at International Semantic Web Conference

Elsevier , a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Semantic Web Challenge (SWC). Determined by a jury of leading experts from both academia and industry, winners were announced at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Boston, MA, this month. The challenge and allocated prizes were sponsored by Elsevier.

SWC contestants competed in any of two challenge categories: 'Open Track' and 'Billion Triples Track'. Open Track contestants are required to submit applications that utilize the semantics (meaning) of data and applications are designed to operate in an open web environment where information sources are under diverse ownership and control; Billion Triples Track contestants have to reason with a pre-supplied, very big data set of mixed quality.

Of this year's 24 submissions, the panel of experts selected 4 Open Track Challenge winners and 1 Billion Triples Track winner.

Open Track challenge:

• 1 ^st prize: " Event Media" by Houd Khrouf, Vuk Milicic and Raphaël Troncy from EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France - This application demonstrates how to use semantic web technology to more efficiently and easily integrate multiple online and social media content sources that evolve over time.
• 2 ^nd prize:  " Semantic Processing of Urban Data" by S. Kotoulas, V. Lopez, R Lloyd, M. Sbodid, F. Lecue, M. Stephenson, E. Daly, V. Bicer, A. Gkoulalas-Divanis, G. Di Lorenzo, A. Schumann and P. Aonghusa from IBM research's Smart Cities Team -  The mayor of Dublin wanted to know why his ambulances were perennially late so this team 'knowledge mined' hundreds of information sources emanating from the city ranging from usual twitter feeds to garbage collection tags and many more to help the mayor improve city service.
• 3 ^rd prize: jointly awarded to: " Open Self Medication" by Olivier Curé of Universite Paris-Est, LIGM, CNRS - This application advises on self-medication, using the Linked Open Data cloud to mine contra indications for various over the counter medications and adds to these where they were missing. A mobile geo location price comparison tool enables users to find nearby pharmacies that sell the cheapest drugs, enabling French health care insurance companies to reduce their costs; " Wildfire Monitoring" by K. Kyzirakos, M. Karpathiotakis, G. Garbis, C. Nikoladu, K. Bereta, I Papatousis, T. Herekakis, D. Michail, M. Koubarakis and C. Kontoes from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, National Observatory of Athens and the Harokopeio University of Athens - This application combines multimedia satellite images with ontologies and Linked Geospatial Data to improve the wildfire monitoring service used by the Greek civil protection agencies, military, and firefighters.

Billion Triples Track challenge:

• " Exploring the linked data cloud" by X. Zhang, D. Song, S.Priya, Z. Daniels, K. Reynolds and J. Heflin of Lehigh University, USA. This system allows users to understand how massive data sets are populated and reveals patterns in within these data sets.

"We were extremely impressed by the demos this year, many of which were interesting, well designed, highly polished, and had clear use cases for both the general public and for domain experts," explained SWC co-chairs Andreas Harth, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield.

In 2003 the SWC was set up to showcase the very latest in semantic web technology. Over the years the challenge has attracted over 165 submissions from across the globe. Every year the final rounds of this competition take place at the annual International Semantic Web Conference. The continuing maturity of the tools and components used to build applications has resulted in increasingly more compelling demonstrations.

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