The 2019 STI2 Semantic Summit

Scope of the event

The STI Semantic Summit is a bi-annual strategic event that brings together key players within the Semantic Web and Linked Data community to discuss medium- and long-term research perspectives. The Summits are designed to be intellectually, socially, and geographically stimulating and address a focused number of open research questions and industrial challenges of strategic importance. The 2019 Summit follows past Summits in 2017, 2015, 2013 and 2011. The discussions will be forward looking and will attempt to better understand the upcoming challenges and research directions in the Semantic Technology Community.

While methods for representing, publishing and retrieving knowledge have been an active research field for decades, only recently the technologies around knowledge graphs have started to take hold in industry. Knowledge graphs can be used to integrate and organise internal and external data sources. A broad spectrum of automation task in Artificial Intelligence require access to formally represented knowledge, as basis for human-machine interfaces and to explain decisions taken by an AI systems. The flexibility of knowledge graphs provides a powerful foundation for current and future knowledge-based applications, ranging from machine learning and analytics to chatbots and virtual assistants to mixed reality systems.

We have initially selected the following themes:

• ​Representation of knowledge in pilots and use cases in vertical domains
  • Tourism, retail, utilities, finance, science and education
• Curating and integrating knowledge graphs at scale
  • Principles and methodologies for the creation, hosting, assessment, cleaning, enrichment, validation and verification of knowledge
• Analytics on knowledge graphs
  • Profiling, mining, learning for and on knowledge graphs
• Representation of temporal aspects and processes
  • APIs, services and the Web of Things
  • Decentralised architectures for smart-X (city, enterprise, energy...) systems
• Building systems based on knowledge graphs
  • Architectures for deploying systems based on knowledge graphs: agent architectures, control loops
  • Methods and approaches for interacting with knowledge graphs: chatbots and virtual assistants, mixed reality environments

The target audience for the invitation-only Summit are senior researchers.

The event

Andreas Harth : Chair of Technical Information Systems, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany and Fraunhofer IIS-SCS, Nuremberg, Germany

John Domingue : President, STI International and Director, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK