Semantic technologies, are beginning to play increasingly important roles across a broad range of applications. 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. This project provides funds to subsidize the travel expenses of 10-15 students at U.S. universities to attend the 2013 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) which will be held October 21-25, 2013 in Sydney, Australia.
ISWC is a premier international conference which offers a venue for presentation of rigorously peer-reviewed research results in Semantic Web and allied areas. The conference includes two events specially targeted to graduate students: The ISWC doctoral consortium offers an opportunity for doctoral students to present their work and receive feedback and mentoring. The ISWC Career Mentoring lunch provides an informal setting for students to discuss all issues pertaining to research careers with senior researchers in the community, and to establish long-term mentoring ties.
Broader impacts of the project include: Enhanced opportunities for training and mentoring of US-based graduate students in Semantic Web and related areas, broadening the particiation of students from groups (women and minorities) that are currently under-represented in Computer Science in general, and Semantic Web in particular.
The Semantic Web is an area of computer science research that investigates a next-generation infrastructure for the World Wide Web that is equally accessible, understandable, and reason-able for humans and machines alike. Today a wide range of researchers, universities, libraries and museums, government agencies, and major companies are using Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, Linked data, reasoning engines, and so forth. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the annual meeting of the research community where the newest and highest-quality work is presented and discussed. The 2013 edition of ISWC took place in Sydney, Australia. With the provided funds, we were able to support 10 PhD students from 8 different US-based universities to attend the conference and thus submit and present their research. Without this funding, the students would have been unable to travel to ISWC 2103. The students contributed a variety of papers and activities and thereby helped to make ISWC 2013 a success. For instance: A female student contributed a full paper to the ISWC evaluation track. Another student contributed a full paper to the In-Use track as well as a demo track presentation and short paper. Two other student jointly co-authored a full paper to the research track A student co-organized a workshop. Two students presented their work at the Doctoral Consortium. The work presented by the students is already being used by Semantic Web researchers around the globe. For instance, the paper 'String Similarity Metrics for Ontology Alignment' presented by a funded student received 19 citations within the first 12 months.
