NeOn Members Sweep Best Paper Awards at Asian Semantic Web Conference

From NeOn Project

NeOn members dominated the Best Research Paper competition at the Asian Semantic Web Conference, which took place in Bangkok on 2-5 February, 2009.

After being postponed in December 2008, due to the political situation in Bangkok, the third ASWC finally took place last week at the Rama Gardens Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.

Researchers from all over the world gathered there to present their latest results on various topics related to the Semantic Web. The award for best research paper went to the paper entitled "Identifying key concepts in an ontology through the integration of cognitive principles with statistical and topological measures". This paper is authored by three members of the Open University (Silvio Peroni, Enrico Motta, and Mathieu d'Aquin) and describes a method for automatically extracting the best concepts which describe an ontology. This approach has been shown empirically to correlate with the selections made by human experts. This work is potentially very significant, as it may lead to new ways to visualize and navigate ontologies, as well as new approaches to ontology evolution, ontology matching and ontology-driven data classification.

This great achievement was made even better as, among the three nominees for the best paper award, another paper co-authored by NeOn members was chosen: A Modularization-based Approach to Finding All Justifications for OWL DL Entailments. This paper, which was presented by Guilin Qi of the University of Karlsruhe, details a novel approach, based on ontology modularization techniques, which speeds up the costly process of finding justifications for ontological entailments.

Mathieu d'Aquin from The Open University and Peter Haase and Guilin Qi from the University of Karlsruhe attended the award ceremony and duly celebrated this fantastic NeOn achievement with excellent Thai food and traditional dances.