For collaborative international research projects in the area of intelligent information management, the Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) in cooperation with research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig opens positions for:

2 PhD and 1 PostDoc Position in Knowledge Engineering / Semantic Web

The positions are primarily based at BUAS (Switzerland) and funded by European FP7 projects and possibly Swiss national research grants. A close collaboration and ca. 4 research visits per year at AKSW research group at Universität Leipzig (Germany) are envisaged for the PhD students to complete their PhD program.

We offer
The stimulating environment of two research institutes in the fields of Business Informatics, Semantic Web, Ontology Engineering, Linked Data Web, Knowledge Management, Data integration and Service-Oriented Architectures;

• Long-term collaboration with well-known academic institutions and major companies around the world;
• A multicultural working place with state-of-the-art infrastructure, a competitive salary and resources including funding for attending international conferences, PhD symposia, summer schools, etc.;
• competitively funded PhD positions close to the rate of the Swiss National Science Foundation (currently ca. CHF 41’000);
• competitively paid Postdoc positions commensurate with the pay scale of BUAS (starting at CHF 80’000 depending on experience).

We expect

• A strong background in Computer Science or related disciplines;
• Excellent software engineering skills with demonstrated proficiency in modern software development;
• The willingness to work in an international environment and combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research in order to solve real-world problems;
• Research interest and expertise in at least one of the following: knowledge representation and ontology languages, natural language processing, data management and integration, Semantic Web standards, business aspects of semantic systems;
• Prospective PhD students should fulfill the doctorate entrance requirements of Universität Leipzig (i.e. masters degree or equivalent)
• Proficiency in English and the willingness to learn one of the official Swiss languages (e.g. German, French, Italian).

To apply
Applicants should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae incl. list of publications, a research statement and the names and addresses of two referees, via email (PDF only) to ksm1@bfh.ch (Dr. Michael Kaschewsky, Head of Research Group, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Business School). Positions are open until filled, but candidates are advised to apply by 1 March 2012. In addition, qualified Postdoctoral researchers have the opportunity to get funding for their position and additionally for a doctoral position that they supervise independently but must apply by 15 February 2012 – if you are interested please contact us asap.

About us
Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) is the regional leader in applied science and research with seven departments across three cities. Research at the Business School in Bern is nationally leading and internationally renowned in the field of e-government and applied informatics in the public sector.
AKSW research group at the Universität Leipzig is establishing theoretical results and scalable implementations for the Semantic Data Web (e.g. DBpedia, OntoWiki, DL-Learner). Particular emphasis is given to areas such as ontology creation and manipulation, knowledge extraction, ontology learning and information & data integration on the Semantic Data Web.
Additional information regarding our research and projects as well as further information concerning these positions is available at http://bfh.ch and http://aksw.org.

The NLP Interchange Format (NIF) is an RDF/OWL-based format that aims to achieve interoperability between Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, language resources and annotations. The core of NIF consists of a vocabulary, which can represent Strings as RDF resources. A special URI Design is used to pinpoint annotations to a part of a document. These URIs can then be used to attach arbitrary annotations to the respective character sequence. Employing these URIs, annotations can be published on the Web as Linked Data and interchanged between different NLP tools and applications.

In order to simplify the combination of tools, improve their interoperability and facilitating the use of Linked Data we developed the NLP Interchange Format (NIF). NIF addresses the interoperability problem on three layers: the structural, conceptual and access layer. NIF is based on a Linked Data enabled URI scheme for identifying elements in (hyper-) texts (structural layer) and a comprehensive ontology for describing common NLP terms and concepts (conceptual layer). NIF-aware applications will produce output (and possibly also consume input) adhering to the NIF ontology as REST services (access layer). Other than more centralized solutions such as UIMA and GATE, NIF enables the creation of heterogeneous, distributed and loosely coupled NLP applications, which use the Web as an integration platform. Another benefit is, that a NIF wrapper has to be only created once for a particular tool, but enables the tool to interoperate with a potentially large number of other
tools without additional adaptations. Ultimately, we envision an ecosystem of NLP tools and services to emerge using NIF for exchanging and integrating rich annotations.

We designed NIF to be very light-weight and to reduce the amount of triples to achieve better scalability. The following triples in N3 Syntax express that the string “W3C” on http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html (index 22849 to 22852) is linked to the DBpedia resource of “World_Wide_Web_Consortium”:

@prefix ld: <http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html#> .
@prefix str: <http://nlp2rdf.lod2.eu/schema/string/> .
@prefix dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/> .
@prefix scms: <http://ns.aksw.org/scms/> .
@prefix nerd: <http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#> .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C str:anchorOf "W3C" .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C scms:means dbpedia:World_Wide_Web_Consortium .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C a dbo:Organisation , nerd:Organization .


NIF already incorporates the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) and the Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) ontology. Please get in contact, if you know of further NLP ontologies, which we can reuse and integrate in NIF.

This release consists of the following items:

• The specification of NIF 1.0. This document will guide the further implementation of NIF-enabled services. An average wrapper requires around 200-500 lines of code. The spec integrates several domain ontologies (OLiA, NERD) and will be extended in the future to cover more domains.
• A community portal with a mailing list: nlp2rdf@lists.informatik.uni-leipzig.de . Read how to get involved.
• A reference implementations of NIF 1.0 in Java
  • Release 1.2
  • Source code
• Wrapper implementations for Stanford CoreNLP, SnowballStemmer, OpenNLP, MontyLingua, DBpedia Spotlight, UIMA, Gate (for ANNIE and also generic output), Mallet (alpha)
  • Demo GUI (with links to implementations):
  • List of implementations
• Tutorials and Tutorial Challenges
  • Tutorial: How to call a NIF web service with your favorite SemWeb library
  • Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Search
  • Tutorial Challenge: Multilingual Part-Of-Speech Tagger
  • Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Yellow Pages
• Slides
• A technical report including some evaluation.

We would like to thank our colleagues from AKSW research group and the LOD2 project for their helpful comments and inspiring discussions during the development of NIF. Especially, we would like to thank Christian Chiarcos for his support while using OLiA, the members of the Working Group on Open Data in Linguistics and the students that participated in the NIF field study: Markus Ackermann, Martin Brümmer, Didier Cherix, Marcus Nitzschke, Robert Schulze.

The closing ceremony of ISWC2011 in Bonn is just over and we are excited to have won the best research paper award with our paper:

Mohamed Morsey, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, Axel Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo: DBpedia SPARQL Benchmark – Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data. To appear in Proceedings of 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2011), Oct 23-27, 2011, Bonn, Germany. [BIB]

In the paper we describe on the example of DBpedia how domain-specific SPARQL benchmarks can be generated and used for assessing the performance of triples stores.

Its a great  success for Mohamed Morsey, who did most of the implementation work and is only in the second year of his PhD studies at AKSW.

20 students from about 10 different countries were in Leipzig last week, from 12 – 18 September, to attend the Indian-Summer School on Linked Data. Right from the basics of Linked Data, introduced by Chris Bizer and Sören Auer, they learnt about the intricate details of Linked Data such as Interlinking, Conversion, NLP, Reasoning, SPARQL, Linked Semantic Multimedia and more. The AKSW experts shared the details of OntoWiki, RDFaCE, Mobile Semantic Applications, LinkedGeoData.  A poster session was also organized in the middle of the week, where each student got a chance to present their work as well to see the work of other attendees, aiding in networking, finding students with similar interest for further collaborations and also getting insightful comments from experts in the field. The best poster with the title “On Linked Data Indexing and Querying”, was awarded to Martin Svoboda from Charles University in Prague. Besides just passively listening to lectures, the students were asked to do a student project within a week to get hands-on experience of Linked Data. They were presented with several topics, from the AKSW members who would act as mentors, which they could choose according to their interest and over the next two days they were given time to work on it. On Saturday, all groups presented their work and the projects really showed that exciting results can be achieved even in a short period of time using Linked Data! Each group could implement their ideas and show a demo too. We awarded a prize to the best group, which consisted of Gareev Rinat, Michael Meder, Ivo Lasek and Robert Yao, based on a poll from all the attendees. They worked on the “Entity Disambiguation” project, supervised by Axel Ngonga. With all the hard work, there was also time for play, which included a welcome reception at an authentic German restaurant, Thüringer Hof, a city tour around Leipzig’s cultural center and an excursion to Fockeberg, a small hill in Leipzig, accompanied with barbecue and drinks. Check out the photographs here !

Hello world,

We are happy to announce that LIMES has been extended with an interface that will make linking easier than ever before. The COLANUT (Complex Linking in a NUTshell) interface implements time-efficient schema matching algorithms that allow LIMES to discover and suggest initial class and properties matchings for linking. The whole is embedded in an easy-to-use GUI that allows you to create link specifications easily and download them as XML files or simply to run them online. Check COLANUT out at http://limes.aksw.org/colanut. A technical description can be found here.

And before I forget, two papers centered around linking with LIMES were accepted at OM2011, the ontology matching workshop at ISWC. Come around and get all details on the exciting development around LIMES and Link Discovery in general.

Link on,
Axel