Abstract

The Semantic Web is the core technology behind Web 3.0 and marks a transition from publishing data in human readable HTML format to machine readable RDF documents. The multitudes of data we access on the web are linked to each other only through hyperlinks. Machines can seek keywords in a hyperlinked page; but fail to extract relevant meaning from the documents themselves. This causes irrelevant information overload, non-trustable web resources and noise in cyberspace. The Semantic Web provides a technique of linking related data between disparate systems.  This means that the machines can do a little more thinking for us, make automatic inductions and transform indexed searching on the web to a knowledge reasoning platform. In other words, Semantic Search is also an essential part of knowledge discovery from seemingly dissimilar entities and exploratory search.

In this talk, I will discuss (a) factors that affect search on the Semantic Web, (b) our approach to Semantic modeling, (c) introducing creative inductions/ deductions in search for query optimization and ranking, (d) some preliminary results and future research directions.  The semantic backbone for our research is ‘DBpedia’, a Linked Data repository on the web that contains structured information extracted from Wikipedia and is connected to other important databases.  
  

Speaker Biography
Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng is an Associate Professor with the Computer Science Department of University of Missouri, Columbia, MO. He is currently visiting Tsinghua University and Microsoft Research Asia.  He received his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University,  the University of Notre Dame, and Princeton University, respectively.  His current research includes mobile computing, multimedia analysis, semantic search, distributed source/video coding, 3-D analysis and coding, P2P and wireless streaming, and content and network security.
Prior to joining Univ. of Missouri in 2003, he had worked for PacketVideo Corp., Sharp Labs of America, Bell Labs, and Matsushita Info. Tech. Lab of Panasonic Technology. From 1998 to 2002, He was an active contributor to the MPEG4 Intellectual Property Management & Protection standard and the JPEG 2000 image coding standard, where four of his proposals were adopted. He is an Associate Editor (AE) of the IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics & Security, IEEE Trans. on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Multimedia Magazine, and is on the Steering Committee of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, of which  he also served as an  AE from 2005 to 2008. He is serving as the Steering Committee Chair of IEEE Inter. Conf. Multimedia and Expo (ICME), and has served as the TPC Vice Chair of the ICME 2009, the TPC Chair of the 2007 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, the TPC Co-Chair of the Multimedia Comm. and Home Networking Sym. of the 2005 IEEE Inter. Conf. Communications. He was a Guest Editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE’s Special Issue on Recent Advances in Distributed Multimedia Communications published in January 2008 and the Lead Guest Editor of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia’s Special Issue on Streaming Media published in April 2004.