Elsevier Announces 2018 Semantic Web Challenge Winners

Elsevier, the global information analytics business specializing in science and health, is pleased to announce the winner of the 2018 Semantic Web Challenge (ScWC). The winner was recently announced at the 17th International Semantic Web Conference held in Monterey County, California, USA. The challenge and allocated prize were sponsored by Elsevier.

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The Semantic Web Challenge is a highly-prestigious, and the longest-running, competition fostering scientific progress in the field of artificial intelligence on the web. The semantic web and the use of linked data extends the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-readable form. One of the more prominent current implementations of semantic web research are known as Knowledge Graphs .

The winner of this year's SWC is:

• "Intelligence Augmented with Humans-in-the-loop," by Alfredo Alba, Anna Lisa Gentile, Daniel Gruhl, Petar Ristoski and Steven Welch from IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, USA.

The 2018 Semantic Web Challenge focused on progress in Knowledge Graph population and validation and was organized by SWC Chairs:

• Dan Bennett, Vice President, Enterprise Data Services, Thomson Reuters, USA;
• Axel-C. Ngonga Ngomo, Professor and Head of the Data Science group at Paderborn University, Germany; and
• Heiko Paulheim, Professor and Chair for Data Science at University of Mannheim, Germany.

"The team from IBM Research used an intriguing mix of machine learning and human-based reinforcement," said Prof. Paulheim.

"This year's challenge was particularly difficult for competitors for two reasons," added Mr. Bennett. "First, we were limited in the training data we could provide challengers, and second, many of the supply chain relationships we were scoring against came from a 'long tail' of publicly-traded companies for which there is limited evidence publicly available."

This year's challenge centered on fact extraction from internet sources to create and validate new relationships within a Knowledge Graph. An open data set of organizations, people and financial entities was provided by the organizers, and competing teams were challenged to find and model supply chain relationships that indicate a supplier/customer relationship between these organizations using open web data to build and train their Knowledge Graphs.

To ensure FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) scientific reproducibility each teams' Knowledge Graph performance was measured on a General Entity Annotation Benchmark Framework platform (GERBIL), powered by the HOBBIT project benchmarking Big Linked Data. Teams were measured against each other, and against the ground truth as described by privately curated information containing these facts and supplier/customer relations provided by Thompson Reuters.

"For the chairs, this illustrates both the importance of gold data for knowledge engineering as well as value of open data sources, and we congratulate IBM Research on their win," said Prof. Ngonga Ngomo.

The 2018 SWC Winning team from IBM received the 'Big Elsevier Check' to the value of 10 Ethereum (about $2,000 USD at the time of winning). Selected SWC teams will be featured in a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics.

"Elsevier remains a proud sponsor of the SWC as it helps illustrate what the semantic web community can provide to the world by highlighting state-of-the-art developments in AI and web technology," said Sweitze Roffel, Senior Publisher for Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Elsevier. "More importantly, encouraging researchers and practitioners to use FAIR principles to benchmark their Knowledge Graph's stimulates reproducible and transparent solutions in this exciting area, adding to the notion of Explainable AI."

About the Semantic Web Challenge 

The Semantic Web Challenge has been organized in cooperation with the Semantic Web Science Association every year since 2003, with the aim to offer participants the chance to submit their best Semantic Web Applications. Each year, the final competition takes place at the annual International Semantic Web Conference. Over time, the challenge has attracted more than 180 submissions from across the globe. The continuing maturity of the tools and applications has resulted in increasingly more compelling demonstrations. Find out more on the history of the SWC.

About the International Semantic Web Conference series 

The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the premier international forum for the Semantic Web and Linked Data Community. At the conference scientists, industry specialists, and practitioners meet to discuss the future of practical, scalable, user-friendly, and game-changing solutions for AI on the web. ISWC is organized annually by the Semantic Web Science Association and typically rotates between America, Europe and Asia. swsa.semanticweb.org

About Elsevier 

Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, 38,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com

Media contact
Sweitze Roffel, Senior Publisher
Elsevier
+31-20-485-2382
s.roffel@elsevier.com