The Web bears the potential of being the world%E2%80%99s greatest encyclopedic source, but we are still far from fully exploiting this potential. Valuable scientific and cultural content is interspersed with a huge amount of noisy, low-quality, unstructured text and media. The proliferation of knowledge-sharing communities like Wikipedia and recent advances in automated information-extraction technologies from otherwise unstructured Web documents give rise to an unprecedented opportunity: Can we systematically harvest facts from the Web and compile them into a comprehensive machine-readable knowledge base? Such a knowledge base would contain not only the world%E2%80%99s entities, but also their semantic properties, and their relationships with each other.Imagine a %E2%80%9CStructured Wikipedia%E2%80%9D that has the same scale and richness as Wikipedia itself, but offers a precise and concise representation of knowledge, e.g., in the versatile RDF/S data format. This would enable expressive and highly precise querying, e.g., in the SPARQL language (or appropriate extensions), with additional capabilities for informative ranking of query results. The benefits from solving the above challenge would obviously be enormous. Applications include:- a formalized machine-readable encyclopedia that can be queried with high precision like a semantic database;- a key asset for disambiguating entities by supporting fast and accurate mappings of textual phrases onto named entities in the knowledge base; and an enabler for entity-relationship-oriented semantic search on the Web, for detecting entities and relations in Web pages and reasoning about them in expressive (probabilistic) logics;- a backbone for natural-language question answering that would aid in dealing with entities and their relationships in answering who/where/when/ etc. questions;- a catalyst for the acquisition of further knowledge and the largely automated maintenance and growth of the knowledge base.Each of the above aspects will be captured in the form of a 3-hour lecture. Each lecture provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of the respective block and summarizes recent research results in the related fields. A block is complemented by a 2 hour interactive exercise session with a final programming task, during which students are able to practice their newly gained knowledge.

Course leader
Lecturer: Prof. Martin Theobald (University of Antwerp, Belgium)Coordinator: Michael Cochez (University of Jyvskyl, Finland)

Target group
Basic knowledge in databases, basic programming skills (Java/C++), prior course in statistics and/or probability theory is a plus. The Summer School annually offers courses for advanced master's students, graduate students, and post-docs in the various fields of science and information technology.

Course aim
The most important aims of the Summer School are to develop post-graduates scientific readiness and to offer students the possibility to study in a modern, scientific environment and to create connections to the international science community.

Credits info
3 ECTS Passing: Obligatory attendance at lectures. Practical task based on theory lectures, programming challenge with options for team work. Grading: Grading scale of 0 to 5

Fee info
EUR 0: Participating the Summer School is free of charge, but student have to cover the costs of own travel, accommodation and meals at Jyvskyl.



Scholarships
The 25th Jyvskyl Summer School is not able to grant any Summer School students financial support. In order to ensure your participation, we recommend that you take steps to secure your own funding, for example, by turning first to your home institution

University of Jyv%C3%A4skyl%C3%A4
Address: Faculty of Mathematics and Science and Faculty of Information Technology, Jyv%C3%A4skyl%C3%A4 Summer School, Faculty of Mathematics and Science P.O.Box 35 (YK312), FIN-40014 University of Jyv%C3%A4skyl%C3%A4, Finland
Postal code: FIN-40014
City: Jyv%C3%A4skyl%C3%A4
Country: Finland
Website: http://www.jyu.fi/summerschool
E-mail: jss@jyu.fi
Phone: +358505818351