Amsterdam, 9 November 2009 - Elsevier announced the winners of the 2009 Semantic Web Challenge, which took place at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Washington, D.C., from October 25-29, 2009. A jury consisting of eleven leading experts from both academia and industry awarded the four best applications with cash prizes of 2750 Euro in total, sponsored by Elsevier.
Jocularly referred to as "Web 3.0", the semantic web aims to extract meaning and intelligence from the net, and the Semantic Web Challenge has been set up to have ground-breaking new applications compete with each other for highly coveted awards.
Over the last seven years, the Challenge has attracted over 120 submissions, and each and every one has been carefully evaluated on scientific and technological prowess, as well as its practical applicability to solve real world issues. The continuing maturity of the tools and components used to build applications has resulted in increasingly more compelling demonstrations.
The 2009 Semantic Web Challenge was organized by Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research and Chris Bizer of Freie Universität Berlin and consists of two categories: "Open Track" and "Billion Triples Track." Open Track requires that the applications utilize the semantics (meaning) of data and that they have been designed to operate in an open web environment, whilst the Billion Triples Track focuses on dealing with very large data sets of low quality commonly found on the web.
The Billion Triples Track was won by "Scalable Reduction" by Gregory Todd Williams, Jesse Weaver, Medha Atre, and James A. Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA). The entry showed how massive parallelization can be applied to quickly clean and filter large amounts of RDF data.
The winners of the 2009 Open Track were Chintan Patel, Sharib Khan, and Karthik Gomadam from Applied Informatics, Inc for "TrialX" (http://trialx.com). TrialX enables finding new treatments by intelligently matching patients to clinical trials using advanced medical onthologies to combine several electronic health records with user generated information.
The second prize of the 2009 Open Track was awarded to Andreas Harth from the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany for "VisiNav" (http://visinav.deri.org/). The third prize in the 2009 open Track was awarded to Giovanni Tummarello, Richard Cyganiak, Michele Catasta, Szymon Danielczyk, and Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland for the development of "Sig.ma" (http://sig.ma/).
"This year's winner of the Open Track is an application that we can hold up as an example to those outside of our community. In comparison, the Billion Triples Track have attracted less submissions this year, but it has been noticeable that all submissions have dealt with increasing amounts of information. Altogether we see clear progress toward implementing the vision of the Semantic Web." said Chris Bizer and Peter Mika, co-chairs of the Semantic Web Challenge.
"Elsevier is proud to sponsor the Semantic Web Challenge once again, as it promotes the dissemination of knowledge from academia to society by showcasing what practically can be achieved using semantic web technologies, I would like to thank all the participants, and encourage everyone to have a look at their applications online" said Sweitze Roffel of Elsevier.
Notes to Editors:
Photos of the Awards Ceremony: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmika/4059046896/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmika/4059046772/
Winners:
Open Track
1st place:
TrialX
Chintan Patel, Sharib Khan, and Karthik Gomadam from Applied Informatics, Inc
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/documents/TrialX-healthx-iswc09-challenge.pdf
2nd place:
VisiNav
Andreas Harth from the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/documents/VisiNav-paper.pdf
3rd place:
Sig.ma
Giovanni Tummarello, Richard Cyganiak, Michele Catasta, Szymon Danielczyk, and Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/documents/Sig.ma:%20Live%20views%20on%20the%20web%20of%20data-sigma.pdf
Billion Triples Track:
Winner:
Scalable Reduction
Gregory Todd Williams, Jesse Weaver, Medha Atre, and James A. Hendler from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/documents/Scalable%20Reduction%20of%20Large%20Datasets%20to%20Interesting%20Subsets-btc2009.pdf
More information on the 2009 Semantic Web Challenge Awards, as well as a demo and links to all the competing applications can be found on http://challenge.semanticweb.org
About the organizers
Professor Christian Bizer from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, explores technical and economic questions concerning the development of global, decentralized information environments. His current research focus lies on the publication and interlinking of structured data on the Web using Semantic Web technologies. http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/en/institute/pwo/bizer/team/BizerChristian.html
Peter Mika is currently with Yahoo! Research in Barcelona investigating Search, focusing on semantic technologies. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/
About the prize
The Semantic Web Challenge has been organized in cooperation with the The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) since 2003 with the aim to offer participants the chance to submit their best Semantic Web Applications. The Challenge thus illustrates what the Semantic Web can provide to the world, whilst providing researchers an opportunity to showcase their work, compare it to others, and thereby stimulating current research by highlighting the state-of-the-art every year.
About the Semantic Web
The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including the Lancet (www.thelancet.com) and Cell (www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus (www.scopus.com), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult (www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult (www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading publisher and information provider. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).