Winners of 2013 Semantic Web Challenge announced

OXFORD, ENGLAND: Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, congratulated the winners of the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge (SWC).

Determined by a jury of leading experts in computer semantics from both academia and industry, the winners were announced at the 12th International Semantic Web Conference held in Sydney, Australia, October 21-25. The challenge and allocated prizes were sponsored by Elsevier.

The SWC was first organized in 2003 to showcase the very latest in semantic web technology, and is open to everyone from industry and academia. Participants can compete in one of two challenge categories: the Open Track and the Big Data Track. The key difference between the two tracks is that the Big Data Track requires the participants to make use of large-scale data sets.

This year, the SWC received 17 proposals that made it into the challenge; of these, nine progressed to the final round of the competition. The panel of experts finally selected four Open Track Challenge winners and one Big Data Track winner.

Open Track challenge winners:

1st prize: "The BBC World Service Archive Prototype", by Yves Raimond and Tristan Herne; the winners showed a unique combination of audio processing, crowdsourcing, analytics and visualization pulled together semantically allowing the BBC to link and access archive materials within and during live broadcasts.

2nd prize: "Constitute: The World's Constitutions to Read, Search and Compare", by Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, James Melton, Robert Shaffer, Juan F. Sequeda and Daniel Miranker; a curated semantic solution applicable to the legal domain, allowing researchers to explore and compare all of the world's constitutions in one easy interface. In this instance the relevance of how semantic web technology can support real world problems was further demonstrated by the fact that this tool has been selected to draft a new constitution for Tunisia.

3rd prize, jointly awarded: "B-hist: Entity-Centric Search over Personal Web Browsing History", by Michele Catasta, Alberto Tonon, Vincent Pasquier, Gianluca Demartini, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux and Karl Aberer; developed a new, visually appealing way for navigating through your personal browsing history.

"STAR-CITY: Semantic Traffic Analytics and Reasoning for CITY", by Freddy Lecue, Simone Tallevi-Diotallevi, Jer Hayes, Robert Tucker, Veli Bicer, Marco Luca Sbodio and Pierpaolo Tommasi; following the development of Smart Cities, this system showcases how traffic within a city can be better visualized, predicted and managed through semantic technology.

Big Data Track challenge winner

"Fostering Serendipity through Big Linked Data" by Muhammad Saleem, Maulik R. Kamdar, Aftab Iqbal, Shanmukha Sampath, Helena F. Deus and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo; this system shows how high volume and high velocity of latest published bio-medical research papers from PubMed can be intelligently and semantically integrated within the Linked Cancer Genome Atlas dataset (TCGA), thus supporting and facilitating cancer researchers in their important work.

"We were very impressed to see this year's challengers address real world problems and in some cases already see them having a societal impact. The winners of the 2013 SWC have successfully combined innovative semantic web technology with an end user practical focus and efficiency in use," explained SWC co-chairs Andreas Harth, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Sean Bechhofer, University of Manchester.