ISI newcomer Andreas Harth has been honored in an international competition for semantic web projects, for his work on a system that enables collaboration in online communities.
Harth’s SECO project won second prize in theSemantic Web Challenge, which is sponsored by OntoWeb, Springer Verlag andTechnologie-Zentrum Informatik of the University of Bremen. The overall objective of the Semantic Web Challenge is to apply semantic web techniques to building an online application that integrates, combines, and deduces information needed to assist users in performing tasks. The challenge will continue for at least five years and will be updated annually, according to the development of the Semantic Web.
Andreas Harth
The Semantic Web Challenge award also carried a &euro500 travel stipend, and &euro250 worth of Springer Verlag books.
SECO collects RSS data from the web, stores it in an index, and makes it accessible via a web interface. At the moment the system contains information about more than 7,000 people and 2,000 news items. This represents most of the information on the emerging semantic web in FOAF and RSS 1.0 vocabularies.
This data has been created by a large number of people. The challenge is to tidy up this data and integrate it in a way that facilitates easy access and re-use.
Andreas Harth is a visiting research assistant at ISI, working with Eduard Hovy. He will be here through February, 2004, and plans shortly to start his PhD studies at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Harth studied computer science at FH Wuerzburg, Germany, and then took an internship at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab in 2001. He began work on SECO as part of his degree thesis at FH Wuerzburg and the University of Zaragoza, Spain under the ERASMUS program of the European Union.
Published on December 11th, 2003
Last updated on August 9th, 2021
