Abstract:

In this talk I will talk about my work in the context of the MuNCH project (http://ilps.science.uva.nl/munch/) which brings together people from Semantic Web, Information Retrieval, Image Analysis and the Cultural Heritage world. I will focus on two topics. The first is evaluation and use of alignments between ontologies. Can we use links between ontologies to enrich the structure of an ontology? Can we use these links for ontology based search? The second topic is semantic analysis of search logs in an audiovisual archive. Analyzing search queries to find out what people search for is difficult: as explained by the long tail theory, most queries are unique or occur only a few times. Semantics can help to generalize over individual queries and to perform analysis on a more abstract level.

About the speaker: Dr. Laura Hollink is currently assistant professor at Delft University of Technology. She holds a doctorate in computer science from the VU University Amsterdam (VUA). After her PhD, she has worked as a postdoc researcher and later as assistant professor at VUA in projects to improve access to large interlinked collections of cultural heritage institutes. She has done research on the application of semantic web technology to enhance search, browsing and recommendation, and as a means to better understand user search queries. She is co-organiser of a task in the ontology alignment evaluation initiative.

Semantic technology for search

Dr. Laura Hollink

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands