10th UGent Data Science Seminar with Prof. Sören Auer
Prof. Sören Auer (Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, Director TIB, Head of research group Data Science and Digital Libraries): Towards Knowledge Graph based Representation, Augmentation and Exploration of Scholarly Communication
Abstract
Despite an improved digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the fundamental principles of scholarly communication remain unchanged and continue to be largely document-based. The document-oriented workflows in science have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis. We need to represent, analyse, augment and exploit scholarly communication in a knowledge-based way by expressing and linking scientific contributions and related artefacts through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs. This should be based on deep semantic representation of scientific contributions, their manual, crowd-sourced and automatic augmentation and finally the intuitive exploration and interaction employing question answering on the resulting scientific knowledge base. We need to synergistically combine automated extraction and augmentation techniques, with large-scale collaboration to reach an unprecedented level of knowledge graph breadth and depth. As a result, knowledge-based information flows can facilitate completely new ways of search and exploration. The efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communication will significant increase, since ambiguities are reduced, reproducibility is facilitated, redundancy is avoided, provenance and contributions can be better traced and the interconnections of research contributions are made more explicit and transparent. In this talk we will present first steps in this direction in the context of our Open Research Knowledge Graph initiative and the ScienceGRAPH project.
Bio
Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Auer was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. Prof. Auer has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He is the author (resp. co-author) of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has received several awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, a SWSA ten-year award, the ESWC 7-year Best Paper Award, and the OpenCourseware Innovation Award. He has led several large collaborative research projects, such as the EU H2020 flagship project BigDataEurope. He is co-founder of high potential research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the OpenCourseWare authoring platform SlideWiki.org and the innovative technology start-up eccenca.com. Prof. Auer was founding director of the Big Data Value Association, led the semantic data representation in the Industrial/International Data Space, is an expert for industry, European Commission, W3C and member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Before the seminar, at 12 noon, a sandwich lunch will be served for registered participants.