Semantic technologies, Linked Open Data, and knowledge representation formalisms such as OWL are beginning to play increasingly important roles across a broad range of applications.Ontology modeling languages, e.g., RDF, OWL, and RIF, enable the inference of implicit knowledge from knowledge that is explicitly encoded in the knowledge base. Web Reasoning and allied fields focus on the design, analysis, and development of ontology languages, study of their theoretical properties, and the design and implementation of effective inference algorithms. There is an urgent need for advanced training graduate students to conduct research in this area and prepare for academic or industrial careers. Participation in premier research conferences in the area is an essential element of such training.
The Web Reasoning and Rule Systems conference series, established in 2007, attracts the leading researchers in the field of Web Reasoning, and offers a venue for presentation of the latest advances in the field. The co-location of the conference with the Reasoning Web Summer School makes it also an excellent venue for training graduate students. This project provides travel grants for U.S. based graduate students to attend the 2013 Web Reasoning and Rule Systems Conference scheduled to take place during July 27-29, in Mannheim, Germany. The conference is co-located with the 2013 Reasoning Web Summer School, and also with the 26th International Workshop on Description Logics. In addition to attending the invited and contributed talks at the conference, and the Summer School, the students will benefit from individualized mentoring by established researchers.
Broader impacts of the project include the training of a new generation of researchers and technologists in the emerging area of Web Reasoning which is currently seeing substantial industrial interest and uptake, and enhanced opportunties for broadening the participation of groups that are currently under-represented in Computer Science in general, and Semantic Technologies, Web Reasoning, and related areas in particular.
The 7th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR-2013) took place in Mannheim, Germany July 27-29, 2013. RR is a relatively novel conference series that started in 2007 with an event in Innsbruck, Austria and has continued since then annually with conferences held in the USA, twice in Germany, twice in Austria, in Italy, and for RR 2014 in Greece. RR's steering committee consist of several high-profile researchers (www.rr-conference.org/) that continue to push the conference forward and aim at establishing it as a top-tier conference on web scale reasoning. Web-scale reasoning and knowledge representation and reasoning in general are of increasing importance for so called knowledge graphs and next-generation data infrastructures. They facilitate the publication, discovery, reuse, and integration of data from heterogeneous sources. By providing human and machine understandable and reason-able descriptions of data, these technologies are underlying many of the most advanced knowledge-based systems currently developed in research. Examples of such systems include question answering digital personal assistants or large-scale knowledge federation systems. The RR conference series is especially well suited for graduate students at all levels of their career; this is for several reasons: (I) the conference follows a single track strategy, thereby allowing students to attend all presentations; (II) RR offers a poster and demo session for early results as well as applications of rule and reasoning technologies; (III) the conference features a doctoral consortium; and (IV) RR is co-located with the Reasoning Web Summer School. The NSF funding provided by this project enabled 5 US-based graduate students to travel to RR-2013 in Germany to present their papers, join the summer school, and/or discuss with their colleagues and learn from the leading senior researchers in their field. Students received between $1500 and $2000 to cover their flights, accommodation, registration costs, and so forth. the students would not have been able to attend without the provided funding. The student came from 4 different institutions: one from University of California, Santa Barbara, one from Pennsylvania State University, two from Wright State University, and one from New Mexico State University. Two of the students were entirely new to the RR&RW community.
