ADA Lab's CERMINE participated in the Semantic Publishing challenge during the recent Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2015) in Portorož, Slovenia and we won the Best Performing Approach Award!
Extended Semantic Web Conference gathers researchers interested in various semantic technologies. The week between May 31st and June 4th was filled with workshops, tutorials, challenges, poster sessions, networking events and, of course, regular presentations. Apart from our participation in the Semantic Publishing Challenge, I came to ESWC to learn state of the art in knowledge representation (taking notes of ontologies and tools), and to meet researchers interested in machine-friendly scholarly communication.
Each of the three days of the main conference was kicked off by an excellent keynote: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger spoke about Big Data, Lise Getoor about Statistical Relational Learning and Massimo Poesio about Games with a Purpose. Two posters caught my attention: GERBIL, a system for benchmarking semantic annotations, and ODSF for managing data-intensive scientific collaboration.
The Semantic Publishing challenge, in which our CERMINE took place, gathered 9 teams, which worked on two tasks: one for extracting information from HTML pages and one for mining scholarly PDFs. The challenge was a good opportunity to meet some old friends (hello Christoph and Stefan!) and to make new ones (hello Angelo, Bahar, Francesco, Silvio and others!) Also, thank you Mendeley and Springer for sponsoring the awards!
This year the conference took place in the lovely Portorož, Slovenia — right by the Adriatic Sea. It was the 12th edition of the event. As a newcomer, I was enchanted by the friendly and relaxed atmosphere, both pre-organized and spontaneous social events were a testimony that the community is well-integrated. I'm looking forward to the next year's edition!