Elsevier Sponsors 2010 Semantic Web Challenge

Winners Announced at International Semantic Web Conference

NEW YORK, November 16, 2010 - Elsevier announced the winners of the 2010 Semantic Web
Challenge. The Elsevier sponsored Challenge occurred at the International
Semantic Web Conference held in Shanghai, China from 7-11 November, 2010. A
jury consisting of seven leading experts from both academia and industry
awarded the four best applications with cash prizes exceeding 3000 Euro in
total.

The semantic web is an exciting new direction in Artificial Intelligence,
aiming to add meaning to information on a web-size scale. The field has been
evolving over the last decade, and the Semantic Web Challenge showcases some
of the most promising and exciting new applications emerging from this area.

Over the last eight years, the Challenge has attracted more than 140
entries. All submissions are evaluated rigorously by a jury composed of
leading scientists and experts from industry in a 3 round knockout
competition consisting of a poster session, oral presentations and live
demonstrations.

Organized this year by Christian Bizer from the Freie Universitat Berlin,
Germany, and Diana Maynard from the University of Sheffield, UK, the Semantic
Web Challenge consists of two categories: "Open Track" and "Billion Triples
Track." The Open Track requires that the applications can be used by ordinary
people or scientists and must make use of the meaning of information on the
web. The Billion Triples track requires applications to scale up to deal with
huge amounts of information which has been gathered from the open web.

The winners of the 2010 Open Track challenge were the team from Stanford
University comprising of Clement Jonquet, Paea LePendu, Sean M. Falconer,
Adrien Coulet, Natalya F. Noy, Mark A. Musen, and Nigam H. Shah for "NCBO
Resource Index: Ontology-Based Search and Mining of Biomedical Resources".
Their entry provides very clear benefits to the biomedical community,
bringing together knowledge from many different entities on the web with a
large corpus of scientific literature though the clever application of
semantic web technologies and principles.

The second prize in the open track was awarded to the team from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute comprising of Dominic DiFranzo, Li Ding,
John S. Erickson, Xian Li, Tim Lebo, James Michaelis, Alvaro Graves, Gregory
Todd Williams, Jin Guang Zheng, Johanna Flores, Zhenning Shangguan, Gino
Gervasio, Deborah L. McGuinness and Jim Hendler, for the development of "TWC
LOGD: A Portal for Linking Open Government Data" - a massive semantic effort
in opening up and linking all the public US government data, and providing
the ecosystem and education for re-use.

The third prize in the 2010 Open Track was won by a combined team from
the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Oxford University and the University
of Southern California comprising of Denny Vrandecic, Varun Ratnakar, Markus
Krotzsch, and Yolanda Gil for their entry "Shortipedia" - a Web-based
knowledge repository and collaborative curating system, pulling together a
growing number of sources in order to provide a comprehensive, multilingual
and diversived view on entities of interest - a Wikipedia on steroids.

The Billion Triples Track was won by "Creating voiD Descriptions for
Web-scale Data" by Christoph Bohm, Johannes Lorey, Dandy Fenz, Eyk Kny,
Matthias Pohl, Felix Naumann from Potsdam Univesity, Germany. This entry uses
state of the art parallelisation techniques, and some serious cloud computing
power, to dissect the enormous Billion Triples dataset into topic-specific
views.

"The award winners this year demonstrated a range of different
applications which have a huge potential for widespread take up in the wider
community, by presenting information from a wide range of sources in a
meaningful way to the end user," stated Chris Bizer and Diane Maynard,
co-organizers of the Semantic Web Challenge. "It is interesting to see how
the growth of the amount of information that is publicly available on the
Semantic Web is reflected in the submissions which demonstrate the potentials
opened up by this development as well as doing a good job at addressing the
challenges that arise from dealing with a global data space" Said Chris Bizer
and Diane Maynard."

"Elsevier is proud to sponsor the Semantic Web Challenge once again, as
it promotes the dissemination of knowledge from academia to society and
industry. For example, through the SciVerce platform, we look forward to
partner with this year's winners to further enhance the discoverability of
biomedical information by semantically linking our content to trusted
bio-informatical gene databases. But most of all, I would like to thank all
the participants, and encourage everyone to have a look at their applications
online as they are all very impressive demonstrations of the power of the
semantic web" said Sweitze Roffel, journal development publisher of Elsevier.

Notes to editors:

Photos of ISWC: iswc2010.semanticweb.org/node/714

About the winning entries

Open Track

1st Place:

NCBO Resource Index: Ontology - Based Search and Mining of Biomedical
Resources

Clement Jonquet, Paea LePendu, Sean M. Falconer, Adrien Coulet, Natalya
F. Noy, Mark A. Musen, and Nigam H. Shah

Paper:
www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/submissions/swc2010_submission_4.pdf

Demo: bioportal.bioontology.org/resource_index_ui

2nd Place:

TWC LOGD: A Portal for Linking Open Government Data

Dominic DiFranzo, Li Ding, John S. Erickson, Xian Li, Tim Lebo, James
Michaelis, Alvaro Graves, Gregory Todd Williams, Jin Guang Zheng, Johanna
Flores, Zhenning Shangguan, Gino Gervasio, Deborah L. McGuinness and Jim
Hendler

Paper:
www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/submissions/swc2010_submission_16.pdf

Demo: logd.tw.rpi.edu/demos

3rd Place:

Shortipedia - Aggregating and Curating Semantic Web Data

Denny Vrandecic, Varun Ratnakar, Markus Krotzsch, and Yolanda Gil

Paper:
www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/submissions/swc2010_submission_18.pdf

Demo: shortipedia.org/

Billion Triples Track

Winner

Creating voiD Descrip1ons for Web - scale Data

Christoph Bohm, Johannes Lorey, Dandy Fenz, Eyk Kny, Matthias Pohl, Felix
Naumann

Paper:
www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/swc/submissions/swc2010_submission_3.pdf

Demo: www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/naumann/sites/btc2010

About the prize

The Semantic Web Challenge has been organized in cooperation with the The
Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) since 2003 with the aim to offer
participants the chance to submit their best Semantic Web Applications. The
Challenge thus illustrates what the Semantic Web can provide to the world,
whilst providing researchers an opportunity to showcase their work, compare
it to others, and thereby stimulating current research by highlighting the
state-of-the-art every year.

About the Semantic Web

The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current
human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a
machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more
advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better
able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources
in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and
medical information products and services. The company works in partnership
with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000
journals, including The Lancet (www.thelancet.com/) and Cell
(www.cell.com/), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major
reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include
SciVerse ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com/), SciVerse Scopus
(www.scopus.com/), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult
(www.mdconsult.com)and Nursing Consult (www.nursingconsult.com)
, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the
SciVal suite (www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review
(www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions
deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier (
www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part
of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading
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    Media Contact

    Jason Awerdick
    +1-212-633-3103
    j.awerdick@elsevier.com

Media Contact: Jason Awerdick, +1-212-633-3103, j.awerdick at elsevier.com