:: Talks

Abstract:
Recently, semantic technologies have been successfully deployed to overcome the typical difficulties in accessing and integrating data stored in different kinds of legacy sources. In particular, knowledge graphs are being used as a mechanism to provide a uniform representation of heterogeneous information. Such graphs represent data in the RDF format, complemented by an ontology, and can be queried using the standard SPARQL language.  We consider the Virtual Knowledge Graph (VKG) paradigm, where the graph is exposed virtually by means of declarative mappings that specify how to populate ontology classes and properties in terms of suitable queries over the data sources.  In the talk, we illustrate the principles underlying the VKG approach to data access and integration.  We then present recent developments in this area concerning the access to different kinds of data sources, and we describe some significant use cases where VKGs have been successfully deployed.

Short Bio:
Diego Calvanese is a full professor at the Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where he leads the Intelligent Integration and Access to Data (In2Data) research group. He is the Director of the Smart Data Factory (SDF) technology transfer lab of the Faculty of Computer Science at NOI Techpark in Bolzano.  He is also Wallenberg Guest Professor in Artificial Intelligence for Data Management at Umeå University (Sweden).  His research interests concern foundational and applied aspects in Artificial Intelligence and Databases, notably formalisms for knowledge representation and reasoning, Virtual Knowledge Graphs for data management and integration, Description Logics, Semantic Web, and modeling and verification of data-aware processes.  He is the author of more than 350 refereed publications, including ones in the most prestigious venues in Artificial Intelligence and Databases, with 33000 citations and an h-index of 71, according to Google Scholar.  He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and a Fellow of the ACM.  He is the ideator and a co-founder of Ontopic, the first spin-off of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, founded in 2019, and developing solutions and technologies for data management and integration based on Virtual Knowledge Graphs.