ATTENDING ISWS’2022 in Bertinoro
Last week we (Laura Waltersdorfer and Stefani Tsaneva) visited this year’s edition of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS 2022), taking place in Bertinoro. During our one-week stay at the Bertinoro castle, we had a packed schedule full of lectures and keynotes, research collaborations and networking, riddles and morning workouts, and of course a variety of fun social activities.
During a Poster Session, we got to present our own research and engaged in insightful discussions on our work with the tutors and students, while for this year’s research project, we grouped into teams and tackled the topic of Empirical Semantics.
Stefani’s group, supervised by Irene Celino, focused on investigating empirical semantics from a user-centric perceptive. We explored how people understand empirical semantics and what factors influence their subjective ontological commitment (i.e., the confidence with which they agree with a given modeling statement). The completed research project provided a great opportunity to pilot a user study, which we plan to continue by conducting a large-scale crowdsourcing campaign.
Laura’s group was tutored by John Domingue and investigated how decentralized technologies (i.e. Blockchain, Solidity), ontologies, and functional languages for executable permission controls (e.g., eFlint for Smart Contracts) can enable the logging of empirical executions in a privacy-preserving manner. The completed research project aims to establish the first steps towards self-sovereignty in terms of personal data management.
We are happy to have attended ISWS 2022 and are looking forward to collaborating in the future!
