FAIR Data Digest #1
Conference spring 2023, GPT vs Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and money in KG reasoning
Dear subscriber,
Welcome to the first edition of my new weekly newsletter! Within different recurring categories I will provide updates of my work, my personal journey, and topics such as Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data, FAIR data, Open Science and many more.
It is conference season! This first edition will feature not one, but two conferences that just happened: the Digital Humanities conference DHBenelux with the theme “Crossing borders: digital humanities research across languages and modalities” and the (more technical) Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC).
Besides these events, I have to recommend two YouTube videos in this edition. Both relevant if you are interested in what (formal) Knowledge Graphs are and why they become even more important in a world with ChatGPT-like language models!
📅 Events
DHBenelux conference
For centuries researchers have studied humanities disciplines such as history, culture, linguistics or music. The field of Digital Humanities (DH) not only applies computational methods in the humanities, but also uses humanities methodologies to study digital objects.
Last week the 10th DHBenelux conference was hosted at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels (my employer). Especially for me as a Computer Scientist who is working with cultural heritage data, this was a great opportunity to see what the Digital Humanities (DH) community is busy with!
My main takeaway is that DH research not only provides super interesting use cases for digital methods, but also that the humanities point of view can positively influence the tools and platforms that we are building and using!
How might DHBenelux be relevant for you? Grab a cup of coffee or tea and visit my Blog to read a detailed conference report.
ESWC conference
Representing and using diverse data in a meaningful and standardized way is usually achieved with Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. Last week was the 20th edition of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) on the island of Crete in Greece. Unfortunately I did not have time to attend this year. I was only involved as a reviewer for the Knowledge Graph Construction workshop
But in the coming weeks I will try to check the proceedings of the workshops and the main conference and present interesting works in the Newsletter.
Checkout the hashtag #eswc2023 or the accounts of ESWC on Twitter and the Fediverse for more information! If you have never attended a Semantic Web conference, you can check out my trip report of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2019 in New Zealand to get an idea. It is a similar, but larger conference.
🎥 Videos not to miss
The Future of Knowledge Graphs in a World of Large Language Models
Denny Vrandečić, one of the founders of Wikidata, recently gave a keynote at the Knowledge Graph Conference about Knowledge Graphs vs ChatGPT-like language models. He made some really interesting points. For example: 1,000 queries against GPT-4 are 50 times more expensive (7 dollar vs 40 cents) than Wikidata queries, and they might even give a wrong result... Check out his keynote!
“In a world of infinite content, knowledge becomes valuable.” - Denny Vrandečić
Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web: What We Did Right (and Wrong)
Ian Horrocks, who played a central role in the development of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), gave a keynote during an online networking event. This slightly longer talk provides some really interesting history about why formal semantics was needed on top of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to perform reasoning. The talk also briefly focusses on the commercialization of his work into the RDFox reasoning engine and RDF database. Yes, there is money in semantics 💲💲💲.
Don’t forget to share or subscribe. More content and interesting links will follow next week.
Sven