Ronald Siebes

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The mission of resilience of Ukrainian cities calls for international collaboration with the scientific community to increase the quality of information by identifying and integrating information from various news and social media sources. Linked Data technology can be used to unify, enrich, and integrate data from multiple sources. In our work, we...

We observe a growing universe of machine‐readable knowledge organisation systems (KOS) or even wider ‘semantic artifacts. We see at the same time, various attempts to bring semantic artifacts together via registries, catalogues and via cross‐walks among ontologies. This poster reflects how newest research on semantic interoperability informs curren...

The digital transformation is accompanied by two simultaneous processes: digital humanities challenging the humanities, their theories, methodologies and disciplinary identities, and pushing computer science to get involved in new fields. But how can qualitative and quantitative methods be usefully combined in one research project? What are the the...

Understanding the complexity of restricted research data is vitally important in the current new era of Open Science. While the FAIR Guiding Principles have been introduced to help researchers to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, it is still unclear how the notions of FAIR and Openness can be applied in the context of rest...

Despite the pervasiveness of IoT domotic devices in the home automation landscape, their potential is still quite under-exploited due to the high heterogeneity and the scarce expressivity of the most commonly adopted scenario programming paradigms. The aim of this study is to show that Semantic Web technologies constitute a viable solution to tackl...

Linked data (LD) technology is hailed as a long-awaited solution in web-based information exchange. Linked Open Data (LOD) bring this to another level by enabling meaningful linking of resources and creating a global, openly accessible knowledge graph. Our case is the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and the challenges for a KOS service provi...

We introduce AmsterTime: a challenging dataset to benchmark visual place recognition (VPR) in presence of a severe domain shift. AmsterTime offers a collection of 2,500 well-curated images matching the same scene from a street view matched to historical archival image data from Amsterdam city. The image pairs capture the same place with different c...

The growth and population of the Semantic Web, especially the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, has brought to the fore the challenges of ordering knowledge for data mining on an unprecedented scale. The LOD Cloud is structured from billions of elements of knowledge and pointers to knowledge organization systems (KOSs) such as ontologies, taxonomies, t...

The growth and population of the Semantic Web, especially the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, has brought to the fore the challenges of ordering knowledge for data mining on an unprecedented scale. The LOD Cloud is structured from billions of elements of knowledge and pointers to knowledge organization systems (KOSs) such as ontologies, taxonomies, t...

Historical photos of towns and villages contain a great deal of information about the built environment of the past. However, it is difficult to evaluate the information of images that are not labeled or incorrectly labeled or not organized in repositories or collections. In order to make the sheer volume of images that are not tagged with metadata...

Built form dominates the urban space where most people live and work and provides a visual reflection of the local, regional and global esthetical, social, cultural, technological and economic factors and values. Street-view images and historical photo archives are therefore an invaluable source for sociological or historical study; however, they o...

The proceedings explore knowledge organization systems and their role in knowledge organization, knowledge sharing, and information searching. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to knowledge transfer, representation, concepts and conceptualization, social tagging, domain analysis, music classification, fiction genres, museum organizati...

Linked Open Data (LOD) are inherently interoperable and have the potential to play a key role in implementing the 'I' in FAIR. They are machine-readable, based on a standard data representation (RDF - Resource Description Format) and are seen as epitomizing the ideals of open data (see https://5stardata.info/en/). They offer great promise in helpin...

Massive amounts of data from different contexts and producers are collected and connected relying often solely on statistical techniques. Problems to the acclaimed value of data lie in the precise definition of data and associated contexts as well as the problem that data are not always published in meaningful and open ways. The Linked Data paradig...

The management and analysis of large-scale datasets – described with the term Big Data – involves the three classic dimensions volume, velocity and variety. While the former two are well supported by a plethora of software components, the variety dimension is still rather neglected. We present the BDE platform – an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use and a...

Community capacity is used to monitor socioeconomic development. It is composed of a number of dimensions that can be measured to understand issues possibly arising in the implementation of a policy or of a project targeting a community. Measuring these dimensions is thus highly valuable for policymakers and local administrator, though expensive an...

This paper presents work in progress towards developing a new benchmark for federated query processing systems. Unlike other popular benchmarks, our queryset is not driven by technical evaluation, but is derived from workflows established by the pharmacology community. The value of this queryset is that it is realistic but at the same time it compr...

Unification and automation of RESTful web ser-vices' documentation and descriptions is currently receiving increasing attention. The open-source OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger) has become core of this effort and has been adopted by a number of major companies. It allows the description of RESTful web services using objects represe...

Integration of open access, curated, high-quality information from multiple disciplines in the Life and Biomedical Sciences provides a holistic understanding of the domain. Additionally, the effective linking of diverse data sources can unearth hidden relationships and guide potential research strategies. However, given the lack of consistency betw...

Community capacity is used to monitor socioeconomic development. It is composed of a number of dimensions, which can be measured to understand the possible issues in the implementation of a policy or the outcome of a project targeting a community. Measuring community capacity dimensions is usually expensive and time consuming, requiring locally org...

Modern data-driven drug discovery requires integrated resources to support decision-making and enable new discoveries. The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform (http://dev.openphacts.org) was built to address this requirement by focusing on drug discovery questions that are of high priority to the pharmaceutical industry. Although complex, most of these...

Nowadays, more and more distributed digital TV and TV-related resources are published on the Web, such as Electronic Personal TV Guide (EPG) data. To enable applications to access these resources easily, the TV resource data is commonly provided by Web service technologies. The huge variety of data related to the TV domain and the wide range of ser...

Abstract Many Semantic Web problems are dicult,to solve through common divide-and-conquer strategies, since they are hard to partition. We present Marvin, a parallel and distributed platform for processing large amounts of RDF data, on a network of loosely-coupled peers. We present our divide-conquer-swap strategy and show that this model converges...

Many countries have a representative democracy where their governments consist of a relatively small group of politicians that represent the values and beliefs of the majority of the voters. Unfortunately, many citizens are un- satisfied with their rather limited influence on politics especially regarding governments on national level or even highe...

The increasing popularity of Web Services (WS) has ex- emplified the need for scalable and robust discovery mecha- nisms. Although decentralized solutions for discovering WS promise to fulfill these needs, most make limiting assump- tions concerning the number of nodes and the topology of the network and rely on having information on the data a- pr...

In this paper we present our current experience of aggregat- ing user data from various Social Web applications and outline several key challenges in this area. The work is based on a concrete use case: reusing activity streams to determine a viewer's interests and generating television programme recommendations from these interests. Three sys- tem...

Most current attempts to achieve reliable knowledge sharing on a large scale have relied on pre-engineering of content and supply services. This, like traditional knowledge engineering, does not by itself scale to large, open, peer to peer systems because the cost of being precise about the absolute semantics of services and their knowledge rises r...

The drive to extend the Web by taking advantage of automated symbolic reasoning (the so-called Semantic Web) has been dominated by a traditional model of knowledge sharing, in which the focus is on task-independent standardisation of knowledge. It appears to be difficult, in practice, to standardise in this way because the way in which we represent...

Matching has been recognized as a plausible solution for the semantic heterogeneity problem in many traditional applications, such as schema integration, ontology integration, data warehouses, data integration, and so on. Recently, there have emerged a line of new applications characterized by their dynamics, such as peer-to-peer systems, agents, w...

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an effective way of sharing data. Modern protocols are able to efficiently route a message to a given peer. However, determining the destination peer in the first place is not always trivial. We propose a a message to a given peer. However, determining the destination peer in the first place is not always triv...

[About the book]: This book constitutes the first volume of a series of books focusing on the vital and ever-growing field of web semantics. The primary aim of the series is to investigate, present and promote core concepts, ideas and exemplary technologies for the next generation of semantic web research, stemming from both academia and industry....

The information that is made available through the semantic web will be accessed through complex programs (web-services, sensors, etc. )t hat may in- teract in sophisticated ways. Composition guided simply by the specifications of programs' inputs and outputs is insufficient to obtain reliable aggregate perfor- mance - hence the recognised need for...

Resource discovery is fundamental to a multitude of distributed systems, including grids, web-based applications and multi-agent systems. To achieve scalability at a low cost, many researchers have turned to a peer-to-peer paradigm, leading to the development of a multitude of protocols and algorithms being developed, with implementations still lag...

The OpenKnowledge project aims at knowledge sharing through open and flexible peer interactions. Within this project, we are developing a system that supports searching, developing and sharing of interactions/workflows consisting of roles implemented by software that can be shared and executed by peers. Its main requirements are openness, scalabili...

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an eective way of sharing data. The focus of this paper is on distributed search based on Peer-to-Peer technology. In this paper we present the pRoute system where peers advertise a short description of the content that they share, namely a set of terms. Peers remember the advertisements of related peers and t...

Similar to the current Web, the key to realizing the Seman- tic Web is scale. Arguably, to achieve this, we need a good balance be- tween participation cost and perceived benefit. The major obstacles lie in coping with large numbers of ontologies, authors and physical hosts, inconsistent or inaccurate statements and the large volume of instance dat...

Web services are pieces of software that can be invoked via a standardized protocol. They can be combined via formalized taskflow languages. The OpenKnowledge system is a fully distributed system using P2P technology, that allows users to publish these taskflows, and programmers to register their web services or publish implementations of them, for...

The main objective of the MultimediaN E-Culture project is to demonstrate how novel semantic-web and presentation technologies can be deployed to provide better indexing and search support within large virtual collections of cultural-heritage resources. The architecture is fully based on open web standards, in particular XML, SVG, RDF/OWL and SPARQ...

Currently search engines like Google, Yahoo and Excite are centralized, which means that all queries that users post are sent to some big servers (or server group) that handle them. In this way it is easy for the systems to relate IP-addresses with the queries posted from them. Clearly privacy is a problem here. Also censoring out certain informati...

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an effective way of sharing data. Finding the data in an efficient and robust manner still is a challenging problem. We propose a model in which peers advertise their expertise in the Peer-to-Peer network. The knowledge about the expertise of other peers forms a semantic overlay network (SON). Based on the sem...

Finding the right content or experts in a Peer-to-Peer system or Multi-Agent system is a challenging problem especially when it has to be scalable to large networks. The focus of this paper is on distrib- uted search based on using semantic knowledge about the peers in the network. In this paper we present the pRoute system where each peer advertis...

Full-text search is a challenging problem in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) sys- tems. Currently two promising directions to solve this problem are (1) distributed indexes like hash-tables (DHTs) and (2) semantic overlay networks (SONs) which can be divided into systems that cluster peers with similar content based on term overlap and systems that map both the...

This paper describes the design and implementation of Bibster, a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic data among researchers. Bibster exploits ontologies in data storage, query formulation, query routing and answer presentation: When bibliographic entries are made available for use in Bibster, they are structured and classified accordin...

This paper describes the design and implementation of Bibster, a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic data among Computer Science researchers. Bibster exploits ontologies in datastorage, query formulation, query-routing and answer presentation: When bibliographic entries are made available for use in Bibster, they are structured and cla...

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an effective way of sharing data. Modern protocols are able to efciently route a message to a given peer. However, determining the destination peer in the rst place is not always trivial. We propose a model in which peers advertise their expertise in the Peer-to-Peer network. The knowledge about the expertise...

Peer-to-Peer systems have proven to be an effective way of sharing data. Modem protocols are able to efficiently route a message to a given peer. However, determining the destination peer in the first place is not always trivial. We propose a model in which peers advertise their expertise in the Peer-to-Peer network. The knowledge about the experti...

Peer-to-Peer systems are a new paradigm for information sharing and some systems have successfully been deployed. It has been argued that current Peer-to-Peer systems suffer from the lack of semantics. The SWAP project (Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer) 1 aims at overcoming this problem by combining the Peer-to-Peer paradigm with Semantic Web technolo...

Peer-to-Peer systems are a new paradigm for information sharing and some systems have successfully been deployed. It has been argued that current Peer-to-Peer systems suffer from the lack of semantics. The SWAP project (Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer) aims at overcoming this problem by combining the Peer-to-Peer paradigm with Semantic Web technologi...

This paper gives a general presentation of the project: the baseline technologies, an overview of the system, the case studies, and related work

In this paper a methodology is described for ranking information received by different agents, based on previous experience with them. These rankings again are used for asking the right questions to the right agents. In this way agents can build up a reputation. The methods in this paper are strongly influenced on human heuristics regarding the ass...

Currently, computers are changing from single, isolated devices into entry points to a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions called the World Wide Web (WWW). However, the success of the WWW has made it increasingly difficult to find, access, present and maintain the information required by a wide variety of users. In r...

Abstract—Web,Science,requires,efficient techniques,for analysing,large datasets. Many,Semantic,Web,problems,are difficult to solve through common divide-and-conquer strategies, since they are hard to partition. We present MARVIN, a parallel and,distributed platform,for processing,large amounts,of RDF data, on a network of loosely-coupled peers. We...

This deliverable concerns the discovery sub-component of the OpenKnowledge kernel. The discovery component itself is available, open source, with the rest of the kernel but in our report we describe a large scale experiment that evaluates it as a lightweight, scalable and robust WSDL dis-covery mechanism based on real-time calculation of term popul...

Most workflow languages such as WS-BPEL assume that parties playing the roles within the workflows, ie. the Web Services are known at design time. However in an open environment like the Web, it is often desirable to have a more dynamic mechanism where parties can subscribe to a predefined workflow at any time and where a subscription and matchmaki...

Semantics are used to mark up a wide variety of data-centric Web resources but are not used to annotate online functionality in significant numbers. That is despite considerable research dedicated to Semantic Web Services (SWS). This has led to the emergence of a new Linked Services approach with simplified and less costly to produce service models...