Student Travel Fellowships: 2013 Web Reasoning and Rule Systems Conference

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Semantic technologies, Linked Open Data, and knowledge representation formalisms such as OWL are beginning to play increasingly important roles across a broad range of applications.Ontology modeling languages, e.g., RDF, OWL, and RIF, enable the inference of implicit knowledge from knowledge that is explicitly encoded in the knowledge base. Web Reasoning and allied fields focus on the design, analysis, and development of ontology languages, study of their theoretical properties, and the design and implementation of effective inference algorithms. There is an urgent need for advanced training graduate students to conduct research in this area and prepare for academic or industrial careers. Participation in premier research conferences in the area is an essential element of such training. The Web Reasoning and Rule Systems conference series, established in 2007, attracts the leading researchers in the field of Web Reasoning, and offers a venue for presentation of the latest advances in the field. The co-location of the conference with the Reasoning Web Summer School makes it also an excellent venue for training graduate students. This project provides travel grants for U.S. based graduate students to attend the 2013 Web Reasoning and Rule Systems Conference scheduled to take place during July 27-29, in Mannheim, Germany. The conference is co-located with the 2013 Reasoning Web Summer School, and also with the 26th International Workshop on Description Logics. In addition to attending the invited and contributed talks at the conference, and the Summer School, the students will benefit from individualized mentoring by established researchers. Broader impacts of the project include the training of a new generation of researchers and technologists in the emerging area of Web Reasoning which is currently seeing substantial industrial interest and uptake, and enhanced opportunties for broadening the participation of groups that are currently under-represented in Computer Science in general, and Semantic Technologies, Web Reasoning, and related areas in particular.