1° wokshop in Semantic Web Technologies for Human and Social Sciences

Venerdì 11 maggio 2018 il workshop SWTHS 2018 nell'Aula Magna del Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, in viale Andrea Doria num. 6.

Maggiori informazioni sul sito swths.unict.it

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

In the last decades, the need of efficiently organize available data has become urgent for scholars and researchers in the field of Human and Social Sciences. Currently, in fact, data cataloguing and classification are mainly performed by traditional methods like hard-copy archives and standard digital techniques like relational databases. However, such methods have severe drawbacks. For example, they are tools mainly developed and maintained in a local way, so they usually store partial data, rarely shared with the whole scientific community. This results in an incoherent use of information. Moreover, in many cases they do not support flexible data-management and information retrieval algorithms due to lack of advanced automated reasoning means.

Automated reasoning, however, is an essential issue in many systems and applications especially when a large amount of data needs to be collected, integrated, and automatically and independently processed. The outcomes of these tasks are relevant in several data-exchange centric contexts such as financial and electronic commerce, social web interaction tracking and analytics, human sciences, and many other applications where data cannot be processed and queried in a human interactive manner.

Semantic web is a vision of the World Wide Web in which information carries an explicit meaning, so it can be automatically processed and integrated by machines, and data can be accessed and modified at a global level thus allowing coherence and dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, by means of automated reasoning procedures, it is possible to extract implicit information present in data, thus permitting to gain a deeper knowledge of the domain. The definition of a specific domain is widely called ontology.

This workshop is an interdisciplinary forum where to discuss questions concerning relevance of semantic web tools such as Linked Open Data (LOD) , Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Web Ontology Language (OWL) in the ambit of Human and Social Sciences and their applicability to specific problems in such fields.