SKM3 at ISWC 2018

Every year the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the main destination for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The 17th edition of the conference was held last week at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey, California, and it hosted around 500 researchers coming from all around the world.This year the SKM3 presented three full papers, covering all the main tracks, and two demos.

The paper in the highly selective Research Track is entitled Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) and presents an innovative approach to producing evolved versions of scholarly ontologies that is able to consider pragmatic business requirements within a formal ontology evolution framework. POE was applied to a real-world test case provided by our commercial partner, the Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification, yielding excellent results.

The paper in the Resources Track introduces the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large- scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 25K concepts. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to support a variety of applications for classifying research publications, modelling the evolution of research communities, and predicting research trends. The SKM³ team recently developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO.

Finally, we will present at the In-Use Track a paper describing the Smart Book Recommender(SBR), an ontology-based recommender system developed in collaboration with Springer Nature, which supports their Computer Science editorial team in selecting the products to market at specific venues. SBR recommends books, journals, and conference proceedings relevant to a conference by taking advantage of a semantically enhanced representation of about 27K editorial products.

ISWC is a very selective conference and it is rather rare for a single research group to cover all three main tracks, hence we are extremely pleased with the result, which evidences the quality and impact of our work.

The papers presented at ISWC are the following:

• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA). (local version)
• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A., and Motta, E. (2018) Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA). (local version)
• Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA). (local version)

The demos presented at ISWC are:

• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Poster Track. Monterey, CA (USA).
• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A., and Motta, E. (2018) The Smart Book Recommender: An Ontology-Driven Application for Recommending Editorial Products, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Poster Track. Monterey, CA (USA).