Challenging Retrieval Scenarios: Social Media and Linked Open Data

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Thomas Gottron

DATE: Monday, April 23rd, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI 008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30

ABSTRACT:
The aim of the ROBUST project is to analyze online communities with a business background in order to allow for a better understanding and management of these communities. This aim entails several challenges set in the field of information retrieval. In this talk I will give a brief introduction into the project and then focus in more detail on two quite different challenges that have been dressed in the context of ROBUST: Retrieval on social media and on linked data. The dynamics of social media imply new needs regarding the assessment of content quality and the notion of relevance. Here I will address the concept of "Interestingness" as a metric for assessing content quality in a microblogs. A quite different challenge underlies retrieval tasks over linked data. The linked data movement promotes the distributed publication of semantic data on the web. Schema extraction is one solution we are currently investigating to narrow the gap between document retrieval and semantic retrieval.

BIO:
Thomas Gottron studied mathematics, computing science and business management at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and the Glasgow University, UK. He received his PhD in computing science in 2008 at the University of Mainz. His research interests are in the area of Information Retrieval in the context of social networks and social media as well as semantic data. Since 2010 he is a PostDoc and research assistant at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST) at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He is the technical coordinator of the EC project ROBUST -- Risk and Opportunity management of huge-scale BUSiness communiTy cooperation. 

HOST: Prof. Fabio Crestani