Professor Eero Hyvönen

The opening keynote will be given by Professor Eero Hyvönen. He is Professor of Semantic Media Technology at the Helsinki University of Technology, and Docent of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. He is also Director of the Semantic Computing Research Group SeCo specializing, e.g., on the Semantic Web, a topic of his talk as well:

CultureSampo - Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web
Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo)
Helsinki University of Technology and University of Helsinki
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/

This talk concerns the idea of publishing heterogeneous cultural heritage content on the Semantic Web. By heterogeneous content we mean cross-domain metadata describing potentially any kind of cultural objects, including artifacts, photos, paintings, videos, folklore, folk music, cultural sites, cultural process descriptions, biographies, history etc. The metadata schemas used are different and the metadata may be represented at different levels of semantic precision. This work is an extension to previous research on semantic cultural portals, such as MuseumFinland, that are usually based on a shared homogeneous schema, such as Dublin Core, and focus on content of similar kinds, such as artifacts.

Our experiences suggest that a semantically richer event-based knowledge representation scheme than traditional metadata schemas is needed in order to support reasoning when performing semantic search and browsing. The new key idea is to transform different forms of metadata into our underlying event-based knowledge about the entities and events that take place in the world or in fiction. This approach facilitates, at the same time, both semantic interoperability and reasoning about the world and stories, which enables implementation of more intelligent services for the end-user. These ideas are addressed by presenting and demonstrating in practice the solution approaches taken in our new kind of cross-domain semantic cultural portal "CultureSampo - Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web".
More information at: http://www.kulttuurisampo.fi/

 

Professor Sylvia Adamson

The closing keynote will be given by Professor Sylvia Adamson. She is Professor of Renaissance Literature, and her work attempts to historicise texts and their interpretation by tracing both the relation between linguistic change and stylistic choice and the historical evolution of styles of writing and practices of reading. The outcomes of this enterprise have included a series of studies in the language of narrative, ranging from the Puritan conversion narrative through the Romantic bildungsroman to the New Journalism, and a two-part history of literary style from the Renaissance to the present day (which can be found in volumes 3 and 4 of The Cambridge History of the English Language, 1998/9). Her main ongoing project is a history of the parts of speech in English grammar, in grammatical theory and in literary practice. (Retrieved from: http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/staff/research/sylviaadamsonresearch.html)

See http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/sylviaadamson.html for Professor Adamson's CV and selected publications.