SemSys at ISWC’25
SemSys members (Alex, Fajar, Katrin, Majlinda, Marta and Stefani) attended the 24th edition of ISWC in Nara, Japan.
Sunday and Monday were filled with workshops, tutorials, and Dagstuhl-style sessions, ranging from Ontology Matching, Scientific Knowledge Representation, Discovery and Assessment, Wikidata, Rage-KG, and more. The program also included the 1st edition of the HAIBridge workshop, where Stefani presented the paper “A Transparent and Adaptive AI Assistant for Teaching Knowledge Engineering” (co-authored by Laura, Majlinda, and Marta), which introduces an AI assistant framework designed to support students in modeling ontology constraints by combining multiple LLMs, an audit layer, and a feedback loop. During the same time-slot, Marta attended the dagstuhl workshop on “Trust, Autonomy and Accountability in PKG-Based Agentic AI (TAPAI)” where she was part of the opening panel discussion together with Sabrina Kirrane and Anna-Lisa Gentile.
The main conference days opened with a keynote by Denny Vrandečić titled “Wikipedia and the Semantic Web: Celebrating 20 Years of Co-Development and the Future,” in which he traced the joint evolution of Wikipedia and the Semantic Web, leading to systems such as Semantic MediaWiki, DBpedia, and Wikidata, and discussed how the emerging convergence of knowledge graphs and LLMs may shape the next era of open knowledge.
The rest of the days continued with interesting papers presented in different sessions including benchmarks, graph completion and link prediction, knowledge integration and so on.
Other inspiring keynotes were delivered by Satoshi Sekine, who spoke on Building Safety in Large Language Models, and Yuko Harayama, who addressed Human Society Challenged by AI. Sekine discussed current efforts to make generative models more transparent, reliable, and accountable. Harayama offered a broad societal perspective on how AI is reshaping public life and highlighted the growing importance of international collaboration and governance frameworks to ensure trustworthy AI.
At the end of first main conference day, Fajar presented his poster entitled “An Ontology for the Common Data Format on Football Match Data”, which was co-authored by Gregor and Matthias Kempe (Uni Wien) – during the minute madness and the poster sessions. The poster explains about an ontology representation for football match data based on a recent standard data exchange.
On the last day of the conference, Katrin presented her in-use track paper “Enhancing Transparency in Smart Grids: the SENSE Framework”, co-authored by Marta and Fajar, as well as some of our colleagues from the SENSE project. The paper summarizes the main outcomes of our SENSE project, which concluded after 2.5 years this summer. It investigated the potential of semantic web technologies for increasing transparency in smart grids and similar systems. The interesting discussions and conversations with fellow researchers showed that this topic is very interesting and relevant also for similar systems, and other research projects.
