ISSLOD 2011, a great success!

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 !

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