November 7, 2008
ISWC 2008 awards
Here is a list of the awards made to papers, posters and demonstration and semantic web challenge entries for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference.
Cash prizes totalling 4850 € were generously provided by Elsevier, publisher of the Journal of Web Semantics, and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), the sponsor of the ISWC series of conferences.
Research track
ISWC 2008 research track included 43 papers selected from the 261 submissions. A panel of judges selected a short list of three papers and attended the presentation of each one.
The Best Research Paper award and a prize of 1000 € provided by Elsevier was given to:
- Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler for Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL
The other two best paper nominees were given honorable mention awards:
- Dumitru Roman and Michael Kifer for Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment
- Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme, Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems
In Use track
ISWC 2008 included fourteen papers in the Semantic Web In Use track. SWSA provided a 500 € prize for the best paper in this track, which was given to
- Kunal Verma and Alex Kass for Requirements Critic: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents
Two papers in the In Use track were recognized with honorable mention awards:
- Jan Wielemaker, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen and Guus Schreiber for Thesaurus-based search in large heterogeneous collections
- Conny Christl, Chiara Ghidini, Joanna Guss, Viktoria Pammer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Peter Scheir, Luciano Serafini and Marco Rospocher for Deploying semantic web technologies for work integrated learning in industry. A comparison: SME vs. large sized company
Semantic Web Challenge
This year the Semantic Web Challenge had two tracks with different criteria: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. After an initial review, thirteen submissions were accepted and evaluated for the Open track and nine for the Billion triples track. A panel of eleven experts judged the submissions in two rounds. In the first, five finalists were selected based on their submitted descriptions and a poster and demonstration on Tuesday evening. The panel then ranked the finalists based on a presentation the next day.
Elsevier provided three generous cash prizes for each track: 1000 € for first place, 500 € for second and 250 € for third place.
Semantic Web Challenge Open Track
The winners of the Semantic Web Challenge Open track were
- First place: paggr by Benjamin Nowack (Semsol)
- Second place: DBpedia Mobile by Christian Becker, Christian Bizer (Freie Universität Berlin)
- Third place: HealthFinland by Osma Suominen, Eero Hyvönen, Kim Viljanen, (Helsinki University of Technology and University of Helsinki) and Eija Hukka (National Public Health Institute)
The judges also noted three other applications:
Semantic Web Challenge Billion Triples Track
The winners of the 2008 Semantic Web Challenge Billion Triples Track were:
- First place: SemaPlorer by Simon Schenk, Carsten Saatho, Anton Baumesberger, Frederik Jochum, Alexander Kleinen, Steen Staab, and Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau)
- Second place: SearchWebDB by Haofen Wang, Thomas Penin, Qiaoling Liu, Linyun Fu, and Yong Yu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Thanh Tran, Peter Haase (University of Karlsruhe)
- Third place: MaRVIN by George Anadiotis, Spyros Kotoulas, Eyal Oren, Ronny Siebes, Frank van Harmelen, Niels Drost, Roelof Kemp, Jason Maassen, Frank J. Seinstra, and Henri E. Bal (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
The judges also noted three other applications:
- Runner up: i-MoCo by the University of Zurich
- Runner up: SAOR by DERI, NUI Galway
- Honorable mention: Virtuoso by OpenLink Software
Doctoral Consortium
SWSA provided a 100 € prize for the best paper in the ISWC doctoral consortium which was given to
- Michiel Hildebrand for Interactive exploration of heterogeneous cultural heritage collections
Honorable mention awards for Doctoral Consortium papers were given to
- Sofia Angeletou, for Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomy Tagspaces
- Jürgen Bock for Parallel Computation Techniques for Ontology Reasoning
Posters and Demonstrations
ISWC 2008 accepted 54 posters and 31 demonstrations which were presented on Tuesday evening during which conference participants voted for the best overall and best student poster and demonstration and best. SWSA provided a cash prize of 350 € for these awards
The best poster award was won by
- Sebastian Boehm, Johan Koolwaaij, Marko Luther, Bertrand Souville, Matthias Wagner, Martin Wibbels (DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe) for their poster IYOUIT – Share, Life, Blog, Play.
Honorable mention awards for posters and demonstrations were given to
- Bella Manoim, Robert W. McGrail (ASC Laboratory) for the poster Toward an Ontology for Finite Algebras.
- Deborah McGuinness, Peter Fox, AK Sinha, Robert Raskin, Abdelmounaam Rezgui and Patrick West (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)for Semantic Data Integration and Registration: Application to heterogeneous atmosphere and volcanic data sources.
The best student poster and demonstration award was given to
- Sebastian Faubel, Christian Kuschel (Georg-Simon-Ohm Hochschule, Nuremberg) for their poster Towards Semantic File System Interfaces
Honorable mention awards for best student poster or demonstration were given to
- Medha Atre, Jagannathan Srinivasan, James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) for their poster on BitMat: A Main-memory Bit Matrix of RDF Triples for Conjunctive Triple Pattern Queries
- Milan Stankovic (Université Paris-Sud) for his poster on Modeling Online Presence
