HUST-TUW Workshop

Earlier this month (February 4th, 2021), we (officially) kicked-off another project where the SemSys group is involved, entitled “Towards a Semantic Knowledge-Based QA System for Vietnamese Tourism”. The project is funded by OeAD and will run for (est.) two years, which mostly focus on the knowledge and personnel exchange between the two universities: TU Wien and HUST Vietnam. 

The first online workshop/kick-off meeting focuses on the first part of the project, the ontology development for (cultural heritage) tourism in Vietnam. We planned to do it in the beautiful city of Hanoi, but well… we all know the reason why we switched to an online setting. 

Before the workshop, the HUST team already built the ontology draft and shared it with the TUW team, together with several questions on the ontology designs and methodologies. The ontology scope is fascinating! We thought before that the content would go towards general tourism (e.g., hotels, POI, transport, etc.). However, this project will focus more on the cultural heritage, targeting the Vietnamese people’s rich culture, with all the dynamics happening in Vietnam’s historical context in the past and present.

The workshop started with the introduction round of the two teams, which is a bit nostalgic since some of us know each other from our time at TUW (Lam and Dat from HUST obtained their PhD here in the IFS group!). 

The discussion continued with the introduction round to the project goals and the ontologies from Dat. He explained the overview of the ontologies, main classes and properties, as well as the reasoning behind the current design. Afterwards, we had a lively discussion on the questions, both on the methodologies and the ontologies’ design. 

We spend almost 3 hours on the meeting – discussing these questions and possible contributions and dissemination targets, both from Semantic Web and Digital Humanities, e.g., SEMANTiCS, ESWC, GLAM, and ENTER conference.  We plan to continue our discussion within the next workshops of the project.

We are looking forward to our next workshop!