Dear all,

I am happy to report that we have just won the Best Paper Award of the
In-Use track of this year's International Semantic Web Conference
(ISWC), for our description of the SPARQL/RDF technology use on Wikidata
[1]. I keep telling people here that the general awesomeness of Wikidata
is the work of many, and in particular of this great community of editors.

Overall, the year's ISWC here in Monterey, CA has surprised Denny and me
with the huge uptake that Wikidata gets by now in industry and academia
alike, which was a huge breakthrough over last year. An amazing array of
people are doing great work based on this data, and again I would like
to pass on all the thank you's I have heard over this week to all of you
working hard to make this happen. Users range from individual students
to major tech companies, and I hope there will be many contributions
flowing back to us through these stakeholders. We also have seen an
increasing amount of research being done using Wikidata for evaluation
and testing, again both in published works and in conversations with
people in small and big organisations.

Let me also congratulate Fariz Darari, who is not a stranger to this
list either, on receiving the Best Dissertation Award of the Semantic
Web Science Association for the research that is also behind some of the
tools he has been creating for Wikidata.

I gave another talk related to Wikidata's ontological modeling, which I
hope did not represent the situation all too wrongly [2] ;-). There will
be videos of this and the best paper presentation, and most other ISWC
talks on VideoLectures in the not-so-far future.

Finally, since our best paper is about the use of BlazeGraph as a
platform for queries, let me also mention that we have had a number of
productive meetings here to discuss the future of this great software
(you may know that there were some organisational changes to the team
developing this so far). There will be opportunity to contribute to this
open source project, either as a developer or in other ways, in the
future. Stay tuned for more information on this.

So, thanks again to everyone working towards the great success of this
project -- amazing work!

Greetings from Asilomar

Markus


[1] Stanislav Malyshev, Markus Krötzsch, Larry González, Julius Gonsior,
Adrian Bielefeldt: "Getting the Most out of Wikidata: Semantic
Technology Usage in Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph"
Talk slides and paper online:
https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Inproceedings3044/en

[2] Markus Krötzsch
Ontological Modelling in Wikidata
Invited keynote at the 9th Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP'18)
Slides: https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Misc3058/en

--
Prof. Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
Knowledge-Based Systems Group
Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed)
Faculty of Computer Science
TU Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
https://kbs.inf.tu-dresden.de/

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