Bilateral collaborations

• Alcatel Bell Lucent: PhD Thesis of Nicolas Marie on Pervasive sociality through social objects (2011-2013)
• SAP Research: PhD Thesis of Corentin Follenfant on Semantic Web and Business Intelligence (2011-2013)
• University Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Senegal: Semantic and Social Web Platform for Communities Knowledge Sharing, (accepted AUF project 2011-2013)

Collaborations

• Alcatel Bell Lucent: PhD Thesis of Nicolas Marie on Pervasive sociality through social objects (2011-2013)
• SAP Research: PhD Thesis of Corentin Follenfant on Semantic Web and Business Intelligence (2011-2013)
• University G. Berger, Saint-Louis, Senegal: Semantic and Social Web Platform for Communities Knowledge Sharing, (accepted AUF project 2011-2013)

There is one unifying thread to all the research challenges proposed for Wimmics: the study of relations on the web. Relations between people, resources or services on the web provide a very rich source of knowledge from both the graph structure they weave and the trends of their evolutions. Relations on the web are at the heart of many powerful algorithms (e.g. PageRank), models (e.g. RDF graphs) and protocols (e.g. Open Graph Protocol). For this reason we believe that modeling, capturing and analyzing relations is a fertile research area.

Behind these questions is a constantly used and reused data structure: typed graphs. In this web context, typed graphs capture: social networks with the kinds of relationships and the descriptions of the persons; compositions of web services with types of inputs and outputs; links between documents with their genre and topics; hierarchies of classes, thesauri, ontologies and folksonomies; recorded traces and suggested navigation courses; submitted queries and detected frequent patterns; timelines and workflows; etc.

A number of evolutions have changed the face of information systems in the past decade but the advent of the web is unquestionably a major one and it is here to stay. From an initial wide-spread perception of a public documentary system, the web as an object turned into a social virtual space and, as a technology, grew as an application design paradigm (services, data formats, query languages, scripting, interfaces, reasoning, etc.). The universal deployment and support of its standards led the web to take over nearly all of our information systems.

The web is a worldwide system never sleeping. In all its dimensions the complexity of the web is growing. The dynamics of the system and its ever-changing contexts make it very difficult to interact with it. The flexibility and extensibility of semantics-based systems is more and more used to tackle the diversity of web resources and applications through metadata describing web resources. But the growing use of semantic representations also augments the complexity of the web and makes it more difficult to interact with.

Videos showing some of our tools

• Semantic Web plugin for Gephi used to visualize cities of more than 500 000 habitants and link them according to their language.
• A demo of an RDF plugin for Gephi using data from BBC.

2012-2013

• Semantic Web @ PolyTech Nice Corese API
  Corese
  Corese Rules
  RIF
  TP Rules
  SPARQL 1.0

Vannevar Bush wrote an article called “As we may think” originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, just before the atomic bombs. In this article Vannevar Bush already identified that “there is a growing mountain of research. (…) The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.

The web is no longer perceived as a documentary system built on a simple protocol (HTTP), a simple addressing scheme (URI) and a simple document formatting language (HTML). It grew to become a huge network of distributed data, applications and users where many flows of heterogeneous messages travel. The web is an object of science: it is a very complex system that requires a multidisciplinary scientific approach. Our institutes are more and more solicited to understand how these data and interactions can be processed, supported, controlled, exploited or improved.