PoolParty at SEMANTiCS 2022: Programme Highlights in One Place

For the last 17 years, Semantic Web Company has been part of SEMANTiCS, the leading European conference on semantic technologies. And this year was no exception.

After years of shortage of in-person events, organizers were surprised to have 300 people attend the conference, presenting a great opportunity to reconnect with the semantic web and AI communities.

Since the event was in Vienna, the headquarters of the Semantic Web Company, many of our colleagues attended the conference. We asked around to collect what their favorite talks were and put them together here for you.

Spoiler alert, we have recordings and slide decks.

Adam has been working for IKEA in different roles ranging from interior designer to user experience design expert and as of today, he is the product owner of the IKEA knowledge graph.

With this fascinating background, he brings to the semantic web community a whole new perspective on how to create a knowledge graph.

What exactly is he proposing? Check it out in his opening keynote at Semantics 2022.

How do we promote collaboration within organizations? Andreas Blumauer, CEO and Founder of Semantic Web Company, explains how knowledge-based recommender systems help streamline the collaboration process by putting humans in the loop.

Knowledge-based recommender systems go far beyond statistics and are better able to meet people’s expectations when it comes to delivering results.

Do you think we can make recommender systems smarter if they are based on people’s knowledge? Discover it here!

As Industrial Sales Director for Ontotext and with an experience of over 400 hours invested in research across Europe over the last few years, Nikolay Krustev knows an astonishingly wide range of use cases of how leading European industries are using knowledge graphs to make life easier for us.

How do all of these use cases help cross-industry semantic links? From Industry 4.0, Smart Cities to Supply Chain Management and Compliance. Check out the recording to learn more about building bridges across industries with knowledge graphs.

Don’t just trust the system, use augmented intelligence to understand why the system came up with that recommendation. By combining data-driven AI with knowledge-driven AI, Squirro and Semantic Web Company have shown that you can get the best of both worlds: great recommendations that are explainable.

From theory to practice, see the methodology they used to create a recommendation system that shows how to deliver better results tailored to the topic, job title, type of business, or buying persona based on a knowledge graph.

Navigate the backend and front end of the demo by checking the recording.

The Industry Panel at SEMANTiCS offered a transparent discussion between industry veterans of the Knowldege Graph Market. Andreas Blumauer, Atanas Kiryakov, Peter Crocker, Joseph Hilger, and Jans Aasman traced their various experiences in the field from the early 2000s until now.

Having expected a quicker adoption of knowledge graph technology from the outset, panelists discussed what the main barriers have been while debunking some common myths that surround knowledge graph integration.

Fortunately, recent years have shown an uptick in effectiveness thanks to wider understanding and smarter customers who are solutions focused.

Panelists also pinpointed future possibilities and the potential for knowledge graphs to innovate the ways things were done in the past. These projects ranged from initiatives that limit hurricane damage to transparency in the electricity market.

The talk was definitely a highlight of the conference!

Search for many organizations does not work at all. In this talk, Enterprise Knowledge CEO Zach Wahl and COO Joseph Hilger will guide you through using enterprise knowledge graphs to deliver search results that are in context and reflect user intent.

Do you want to learn how search has improved over the years and what is the goal of contextual search? Check out the recording and find it out.

Why should we consider voice as an important medium moving forward? Arpita Maity, Director of Product Marketing at RWS Portfolio, gave an insightful talk on the state of voice-search and its impact on businesses today, as well as its future in enabling digital agents to perform better.

“In order to experience more, technology needs to be handsfree”

Learn the details of voice search workflows and integration architecture in chatbots and the role of structured content and the semantic layer in getting the job done. Watch the recording now!

Squirro is a Swiss company that has a lot of experience in solving its clients’ challenges with solutions that come from the probabilistic world, such as insight engines, machine learning, and natural language processing. Although they are new to the field of knowledge graphs, they now aim to bring both approaches together, as they have shown that:

“Machine learning has limitations to provide contextual information (relations) to fully augment human intelligence.”

What is the core problem? In a world of data, where 80% is unstructured, more than 90% of this unstructured data is not used. How can we change that to help improve learning and decision-making in companies?

Bernd Schopp, Chief Commercial Officer of Squirros, walks you through his experience in combining human knowledge with machine learning to create augmented intelligence.

Check the recording to understand more and don’t miss the explanation about all levels of augmentation: Search, Insight, and Recommendation.

On behalf of the PoolParty team, we thank all SEMANTiCS participants. A special thanks to our partners who have contributed amazing presentations and insightful knowledge.

We hope to see you again next year to learn from each other and disrupt the world of technology with semantics.