Semantic technologies, Linked Open Data, and knowledge representation formalisms such as the Web Ontology Language OWL are beginning to play increasingly important roles across a broad range of applications. There is an urgent need for the advanced training of graduate students to conduct research in this area and to prepare them for academic or industrial careers. Participation in premier research conferences in the area is an essential element of such training. This project will provide funds to subsidize the travel expenses of 6 students at U.S. universities to attend the 2014 Web Reasoning and Rules Systems conference, RR2014, and the 2014 Reasoning Web Summer School, which will be held September 8-17 in Athens, Greece. 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 participation of students from groups (women and minorities) that are currently under-represented in Computer Science in general, and Semantic Web in particular.
The Web Reasoning and Rule Systems conference series, established in 2007, and the annual Reasoning Web Summer School series, attract the leading researchers in the field of Web Reasoning, and offer a venue for presentation of the latest advances in the field. Covered topics include ontology modeling languages, e.g., RDF, OWL, and RIF, which enable the inference of implicit knowledge from knowledge that is explicitly encoded in the knowledge base. Web Reasoning and related 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. The co-location of the conference and summer school provides for an excellent venue for the training of graduate students. 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.
For further information see the project webpage: http://pascal-hitzler.de/projects/rr2014.html
