-
Data spaces at Fraunhofer FIT and i5
Fraunhofer FIT and my chair i5 at RWTH Aachen is now contributing to a large number of different dataspace initiatives and projects: NFDI4Health, NFDI4DataScience, SMITH, common European Energy Dataspace, common European Green Deal Dataspace, german mobility dataspace, to name a few.
-
W3C DCAT
The W3C DCAT recommendation was created by a PhD student of mine: Fadi Maali and suggested to the commission by Vasillios Peristeras. It is now the standard metadata format for all Open Data portals in the European Union and gains traction for research data management and many other application areas.
-
Ireland's Open Data Strategy
My team and myself (mostly my team) drafted the governmental Irish Open Data Strategy and provided the alpha version of the Ireland's Open Data Portal.
-
Growing DERI
After I took over the directorship of DERI in 2006 DERI doubled in size and far more-than-doubled its scientific output and reputation. According to Microsoft Academic Search until DERI transitioned into the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, DERI was recognised as one of the top organisations in World-Wide-Web research. For these successes DERI was selected by SFI for inclusion into the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, enabling research funding for another 6 years.
-
The Social Semantic Desktop and NEPOMUK
I coined and established the term Social Semantic Desktop for Personal Knowledge Management with Semantic Web Methods and initiated a large scale EU project (Budget: 17.5 M Euro) dubbed NEPOMUK which included multinationals like IBM, HP and SAP, small companies like Cognium, research institutes like FZI, DFKI, L3S and DERI, application partners like Institute Louis Pasteur, and a dissemination partner like Edge-IT (Mandriva Linux). The goal of the project was to provide a crystallization point for the development of the Semantic Desktop infrastructure. The results are now part of KDE and distributed with Linux.
-
The Semantic Web Working Symposium
I initiated and co-organized (with Isabel Cruz, Jerome Euzenat, and Deborah McGuinness) the Semantic Web Working Symposium at Stanford University, the first large scale Semantic Web event (> 250 participants), which spanned the International Semantic Web Conference, which is now organized by the Semantic Web Science Association.
-
From SHIQ to OWL
Together with Ian Horrocks I created an RDF representation for the Description Logic SHIQ. The result was merged with the at the time XML-based OIL. Then the RDF part of OIL was the main input for DAML+OIL (I was member of the DAML+OIL Joint Committee), which in turn was the main input for OWL - the Web Ontology Language.
-
RDF for Protégé
Since I perceived an editing environment as being critical for the success of Semantic Web standards I pushed for Protege becoming Open Source and wrote the first RDF import/export for Protege, which made Protege compatible with Semantic Web standards (see my announcement to the RDF interest mailing list). Protege is still the most popular editor for Semantic Web Ontologies.
-
HyperCuP
Together with Mario Schlosser, Michael Sintek and Wolfgang Nejdl we created HyperCuP, the first Ontology-based routing algorithm and hypercube topology for P2P networks (the main genius behind HyperCuP was Mario). HyperCuP has been used by a couple of projects as a P2P topology.
-
Edutella
Together with Wolfgang Nejdl I cofounded the Edutella project, the first metadata exchange infrastructure for RDF.
-
The Semantic Web information foodchain
The Semantic Web information foodchain presented in an ECDL 2000 paper and depicted at SemanticWeb.org is widely used as an architectural model and motivation for Semantic Web technology.
-
A DARPA grant at Stanford
While being at Stanford University as a PostDoc (without having finished my PhD at the time) in 1999 I acquired a 1 M US$ grant from DARPA (DAML, Ontoagents, PI: Prof. Gio Wiederhold). I was named key person for the grant, which means the grant would have stayed with me if I had moved. The grant enabled me to establish one of the first Semantic Web research groups.
-
The first RDF query and inference system
Together with Dan Brickley, Janne Saarela, and Jürgen Angele I created the first Query and Inference system for RDF (see the QL'98 paper).
-
Ontobroker and an early Semantic Web PhD
My work on Ontobroker (joint work with Dieter Fensel and Michael Erdmann) was cited as an inspiration for the DARPA DAML program, which heavily influenced the Semantic Web effort and led to the development of OWL. My PhD thesis on the Semantic Web was one of the first in the field, exploring the use of Semantic Web technologies for Knowledge Management.
-
An undergraduate thesis on integrity checking
My undergraduate thesis generalised all at the time known methods for Incremental Checking of Integrity Constraints in Deductive Databases and is the most formal work I have done. It also is the most incomprehensible work I have done. Coincidentally it also is the work with the least impact. The core is a 4 page double induction proof over a data structure representing proofs of Logic Programs done with the SLDNF-resolution procedure. I still believe the described Integrity Checking Method has tremendous application potential (it allows for declarative testing of a data set wrt. to compliance with expressive integrity constraints) and just needs to be modernised, properly explained and properly published (in English, for starters). Maybe I find the time when I am retired.
