2 PhD and 1 PostDoc Position at Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences

For collaborative international research projects in the area of intelligent information management, the Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) in cooperation with research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig opens positions for:

2 PhD and 1 PostDoc Position in Knowledge Engineering / Semantic Web

The positions are primarily based at BUAS (Switzerland) and funded by European FP7 projects and possibly Swiss national research grants. A close collaboration and ca. 4 research visits per year at AKSW research group at Universität Leipzig (Germany) are envisaged for the PhD students to complete their PhD program.

We offer
The stimulating environment of two research institutes in the fields of Business Informatics, Semantic Web, Ontology Engineering, Linked Data Web, Knowledge Management, Data integration and Service-Oriented Architectures;

• Long-term collaboration with well-known academic institutions and major companies around the world;
• A multicultural working place with state-of-the-art infrastructure, a competitive salary and resources including funding for attending international conferences, PhD symposia, summer schools, etc.;
• competitively funded PhD positions close to the rate of the Swiss National Science Foundation (currently ca. CHF 41?000);
• competitively paid Postdoc positions commensurate with the pay scale of BUAS (starting at CHF 80?000 depending on experience).

We expect

• A strong background in Computer Science or related disciplines;
• Excellent software engineering skills with demonstrated proficiency in modern software development;
• The willingness to work in an international environment and combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research in order to solve real-world problems;
• Research interest and expertise in at least one of the following: knowledge representation and ontology languages, natural language processing, data management and integration, Semantic Web standards, business aspects of semantic systems;
• Prospective PhD students should fulfill the doctorate entrance requirements of Universität Leipzig (i.e. masters degree or equivalent)
• Proficiency in English and the willingness to learn one of the official Swiss languages (e.g. German, French, Italian).

To apply
Applicants should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae incl. list of publications, a research statement and the names and addresses of two referees, via email (PDF only) to ksm1@bfh.ch (Dr. Michael Kaschewsky, Head of Research Group, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Business School). Positions are open until filled, but candidates are advised to apply by 1 March 2012. In addition, qualified Postdoctoral researchers have the opportunity to get funding for their position and additionally for a doctoral position that they supervise independently but must apply by 15 February 2012 ? if you are interested please contact us asap.

About us
Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) is the regional leader in applied science and research with seven departments across three cities. Research at the Business School in Bern is nationally leading and internationally renowned in the field of e-government and applied informatics in the public sector.
AKSW research group at the Universität Leipzig is establishing theoretical results and scalable implementations for the Semantic Data Web (e.g. DBpedia, OntoWiki, DL-Learner). Particular emphasis is given to areas such as ontology creation and manipulation, knowledge extraction, ontology learning and information & data integration on the Semantic Data Web.
Additional information regarding our research and projects as well as further information concerning these positions is available at http://bfh.ch and http://aksw.org.

AKSW tools prominently featured in TÜB?TAK

Börtecin Ege wrote an article on the Semantic Web in the December issue of TÜB?TAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) prominently featuring DBpedia, Relfinder, LIMES, SPARQL Benchmark and other AKSW related research projects. See Semantik Web Tübitak Bilim Teknik 12 2011.

NLP Interchange Format (NIF) 1.0 Spec, Demo and Reference Implementation

The NLP Interchange Format (NIF) is an RDF/OWL-based format that aims to achieve interoperability between Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, language resources and annotations. The core of NIF consists of a vocabulary, which can represent Strings as RDF resources. A special URI Design is used to pinpoint annotations to a part of a document. These URIs can then be used to attach arbitrary annotations to the respective character sequence. Employing these URIs, annotations can be published on the Web as Linked Data and interchanged between different NLP tools and applications.

In order to simplify the combination of tools, improve their interoperability and facilitating the use of Linked Data we developed the NLP Interchange Format (NIF). NIF addresses the interoperability problem on three layers: the structural, conceptual and access layer. NIF is based on a Linked Data enabled URI scheme for identifying elements in (hyper-) texts (structural layer) and a comprehensive ontology for describing common NLP terms and concepts (conceptual layer). NIF-aware applications will produce output (and possibly also consume input) adhering to the NIF ontology as REST services (access layer). Other than more centralized solutions such as UIMA and GATE, NIF enables the creation of heterogeneous, distributed and loosely coupled NLP applications, which use the Web as an integration platform. Another benefit is, that a NIF wrapper has to be only created once for a particular tool, but enables the tool to interoperate with a potentially large number of other
tools without additional adaptations. Ultimately, we envision an ecosystem of NLP tools and services to emerge using NIF for exchanging and integrating rich annotations.

We designed NIF to be very light-weight and to reduce the amount of triples to achieve better scalability. The following triples in N3 Syntax express that the string ?W3C? on http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html (index 22849 to 22852) is linked to the DBpedia resource of ?World_Wide_Web_Consortium?:

@prefix ld: <http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html#> .
@prefix str: <http://nlp2rdf.lod2.eu/schema/string/> .
@prefix dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/> .
@prefix scms: <http://ns.aksw.org/scms/> .
@prefix nerd: <http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#> .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C str:anchorOf "W3C" .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C scms:means dbpedia:World_Wide_Web_Consortium .
ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C a dbo:Organisation , nerd:Organization .


NIF already incorporates the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) and the Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) ontology. Please get in contact, if you know of further NLP ontologies, which we can reuse and integrate in NIF.

This release consists of the following items:

• The specification of NIF 1.0. This document will guide the further implementation of NIF-enabled services. An average wrapper requires around 200-500 lines of code. The spec integrates several domain ontologies (OLiA, NERD) and will be extended in the future to cover more domains.
• A community portal with a mailing list: nlp2rdf@lists.informatik.uni-leipzig.de
• A reference implementations of NIF 1.0 in Java
  • Release 1.2
  • Source code
• Wrapper implementations for Stanford CoreNLP, SnowballStemmer, OpenNLP, MontyLingua, DBpedia Spotlight, UIMA, Gate (for ANNIE and also generic output), Mallet (alpha)
  • Demo GUI (with links to implementations):
  • List of implementations
• Tutorials and Tutorial Challenges
  • Tutorial: How to call a NIF web service with your favorite SemWeb library
  • Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Search
  • Tutorial Challenge: Multilingual Part-Of-Speech Tagger
  • Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Yellow Pages
• Slides
• A technical report including some evaluation.

We would like to thank our colleagues from AKSW research group and the LOD2 project for their helpful comments and inspiring discussions during the development of NIF. Especially, we would like to thank Christian Chiarcos for his support while using OLiA, the members of the Working Group on Open Data in Linguistics and the students that participated in the NIF field study: Markus Ackermann, Martin Brümmer, Didier Cherix, Marcus Nitzschke, Robert Schulze.