Projects
Here is a list of some of the main research projects I was involved in over the last few years. Most of the projects have received funding either from the EU or from industry.
“DynamoKG” Exploring dynamic and uncertain facts in knowledge graphs
Marie Skłodowska-Curie personal research fellowship (Sep 2019 - present)
Role: P.I.
Abstract:
KGs are knowledge-bases of facts about entities and concepts (e.g., places, persons, artifacts) which are represented using the flexible structure of a graph. Facts are often extracted from encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, or existing structured repositories (e.g. Wikidata), or even from unstructured sources such as social media posts (e.g. Facebook Graph). For example, a KG containing information about organisations is likely to include facts about companies, their founders, key persons, headquarters’ locations, number of employees, etc. However, facts related to entities or concepts that are dynamically changing over time are usually missing or outdated. The evolving dynamics of real world events are usually not reflected into knowledge bases. Hence, current repositories tend to represent only static snapshots of real world entities, ignoring their changes over time. This project aims at exploring solutions for managing temporal and evolving aspects of KGs and leveraging such features for deeper data analysis.
Beyond 2022: Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury
Irish national research project (Jan 2020 - present)
Role: Lead Research Scientist on Knowledge Graphs
Abstract:
The Beyond 2022 project aims to create a virtual archive by digitally reconstructing and digitising historical records lost in an explosion and destroyed by fire in the Public Records Office of Ireland in 1922. The project is developing a knowledge graph to facilitate information retrieval and discovery over the reconstructed items.
Knowledge Graph-based Legal Search over Court Cases
Industry project, in collaboration with Wolters Kluwer, Germany (2018-2019)
Role: Scientific Lead and Scrum Master
Abstract:
The information contained in legal information systems is often accessed through simple keyword-based search interfaces and presented as a simple list of hits. In order to improve search accuracy one may avail of knowledge graphs (KGs), where the semantics of the data can be made explicit. During this project we developed a KG-based search engine designed for the entire corpus of German court cases mantained by Wolters Kluwer, Germany.
KG-powered Video Summarization
Industry project, in collaboration with Huawei Ireland (2018)
Role: Lead Research Scientist
Abstract:
The amount of video content available on the Web is constantly growing. This has made it harder for viewers to discover the right visual content for them. Recommender systems are being offered by VoD services in order to automatically suggest potentially interesting videos to users. However, recommendations are typically based on: (i) limited video metadata fields, such as genre, title and actors; (ii) the content that other users liked; (iii) private or isolated data repositories. Our proposed approach leverages the richness of semantic technologies to enrich movie metadata, and create meaningful descriptions of movie scenes using video and audio processing techniques. This approach allows for the creation of a structured and interoperable Knowledge Graph (KG) describing movies and their content. This enables deeper data analysis of movie content at Web scale including, for example, algorithms for automatic video summarisation.
SLIPO - Scalable Linking and Integration of Big POI Data
EU H2020 project, 3 years, 7 partners, approx. 3M euro overall budget (2017-2019)
Role: Work Package Leader
Abstract: Locations that exhibit a certain interest or serve a certain purpose are commonly referred to as Points of Interest (POIs). The concept of a POI is quite broad, encompassing anything from a shop, restaurant or museum to an ATM or bus stop. POI data are the cornerstone of any application, service, and product even remotely related to our physical surroundings. The project delivered the first comprehensive cloud-based platform for the quality-assured world-scale integration of Big POI data assets. SLIPO reduces the effort, time, and complexity of POI data integration, providing POIs of increased size, coverage, richness and timeliness at a fraction of the cost. The SLIPO system enables non-expert of linked data technologies to import, link, fuse, and enrich heterogeneous proprietary and open POI data, regardless of their original format, schema, or identifiers. SLIPO integrates and extends leading open source Linked Data to specifically address the requirements of world-scale POI integration.
BigDataOcean
EU H2020 project, 2.5 years, 10 partners, approx. 3M euro overall budget (2017-2019)
Role: Work Package & Task Leader
Abstract:
The main objective of BigDataOcean is to enable maritime big data scenarios for EU-based companies, organisations and scientists, through a multi-segment platform that will combine data of different velocity, variety and volume under an inter-linked, trusted, multilingual engine to produce a big-data repository of value and veracity back to the participants and local communities. In particular I was responsible for WP3 “Cross-Sector Semantics, Analytics and Business Intelligence Algorithms” leading the work on Linked Data vocabularies and the BDO Metadata Repository architecture. In addition to issues of Harmonisation, Knowledge Extraction, Business Intelligence and Usage Analytics Services.
OpenBudgets.eu
EU H2020 project, 2.5 years, 9 partners, approx. 3M euro overall budget (2015-2017)
Role: Project Coordinator
Abstract:
Openness and transparency can act as a disincentive to corruption. Government agencies, data wranglers, journalists and even citizens can access a comprehensive online platform to analyse and participate in public budgets. The OpenBudgets.eu project, known as OBEU, has developed an open-source software framework and a software-as-a-service (SAAS) to support financial transparency and enhance accountability within the public sector at all levels up to European level. OBEU has created a Linked Data platform with a complete set of 13 tools, 3 use-cases and many datasets represented as interlinked knowledge graphs.
ODINE: Open Data INcubator for Europe
EU H2020 project, 2.5 years, 7 partners, approx. 8M euro overall budget (2015-2017)
Role: Work Package & Task Leader
Abstract:
The Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE) was a 6-month incubator for open data entrepreneurs across Europe. ODINE aimed to support the next generation of digital businesses and supported them with the development of their products. I was responsible for the data and tools infrastructure offered to the selected SMEs and the overall evaluation process. The software infrastructure supported SMEs with solutions for open data management, curation, enrichment, interlinking and publication.
LinDA: Enabling Linked Data and Analytics for SMEs by Renovating Public Sector Information
EU FP7 project, 2 years, 8 partners, approx. 1.9M euro overall budget (2013-2015)
Role: Work Package & Task Leader
Abstract:
The LinDA project aimed to assist SMEs and data providers in renovating public sector information as well as analyzing and interlinking them with enterprise data, by providing Open Data renovation and consumption application libraries that are based on the Linked Data paradigm but with a strong business, rather than academic, focus. The LinDA project developed: a) A rule-based system for renovating and converting a wide range of supported data structures into arbitrary RDF graphs, b) A repository for accessing and sharing Linked Data vocabularies and metadata amongst SMEs’, c) An ecosystem of Linked Data publication and consumption apps (visualization, exploration, data mining), which can be bound together in a dynamic manner, leading to new, unpredicted insights.
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