We are moving towards a singularity in the history of human kind: globally interconnected, integrated, and accessible machine readable knowledge, vastly improving human problem solving capabilities in business, science and society. Inspired by Vannevar Bush and his ideas of the Memex, made concrete by Doug Engelbart when he described how to augment the Human Intellect in 1962, enabled by the Internet and the Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee, finally now all building blocks are in place and are coming together. It provides the means to combine and access the world's knowledge at a time when the world is experiencing challenges which require all our combined knowledge and ingenuity. Enabling and exploiting this singularity, which we call Networked Knowledge, for the benefit of humankind is the goal of my work.
 Linked Data and the Semantic Web is the foundation for Networked Knowledge - the raw material. Linked Data and RDF provide the two basic principles to create a global data network: these are the ability to globally identify entities and the ability to create relationships between these entities.
We see Linked Data now growing and co-evolving world-wide in many different parts of society. Now network effects following Metcalfe's law based on the additional value created by interlinking data are accelerating the growth, initially within specific domains, but more and more across domains, reflecting that knowledge is inherently connected and shouldn't be limited by artificial boundaries.
Science Foundation Ireland produced a great introduction to DERI and our goals and ambitions. DERI and the SFI Research Program is now in the past and has transitioned into the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, and I have transitioned to Fraunhofer FIT and RWTH Aachen, but my research vision remains valid.
And here is confirmation that part of it transitions already into reality: 10 years after we introduced the concepts in the "Social Semantic Desktop Paper" and the subsequent Nepomuk project Microsoft implements a Semantic Desktop - see the brain? Now if only Office Graph would work also with non-Microsoft products - and maybe even across systems...? Maybe build the capabilities into the operating system?
All of this continues the work of Douglas Engelbart...
I am a professor at the RWTH Aachen University, and a Director of the Fraunhofer FIT Research Institute, part of the Fraunhofer Society.
Previously I worked at the National University of Ireland, Galway and as the Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute and later Insight at NUI Galway (12 years), at ISI, University of Southern California (2 years, Research Assistent Professor and Computer Scientist), Stanford University, Computer Science Department (Database Group) (3 Years, PostDoc and Research Associate), and Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (now KIT Karlsruhe) (4 years, PhD Student and Junior Researcher). My main research field is the Semantic Web. The usual academic self promotion: my Google Scholar profile claims my publications have received more than 15000 citations and I have an h-index of 59 (the h-index is a metric aiming to measure scientific productivity). Google Scholar also searches authors per organisations (e.g., all authors in Google Scholar from NUI Galway) or even (exploiting the country code) from a country like Ireland. I also maintain a Linked-In profile.
Selected Past AccomplishmentsPast accomplishments include:
Anecdotes and other stuff...
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Towards
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Professor Stefan Decker |
