In this blog post, Leni Helmes, member of the management board and Senior VP of SEMANTiCS 2019 Premium Sponsor FIZ Karlsruhe talks about the mission of this institution how it is carried out in initiatives such as PatentSemTech, an initiative to build and grow the community around patent data and semantic technologies.
FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure GmbH is one of the large non-university infrastructure institutions in Germany and member of the Leibniz Association. Our public mission is „…to provide scientific information to scientists and researchers, to develop appropriate products and services and to make them publicly accessible.” In this context we understand information infrastructure as the entirety of content, technologies and services that enable knowledge to be generated, disseminated and maintained. Information infrastructure is part of the whole scholarly research infrastructure and is becoming increasingly important in the course of the digital transformation.
We develop and operate information services to support research and innovation both in industry and academia. We aggregate relevant sources, index and interlink them in order to support sophisticated retrieval and analyses processes, making research results discoverable and accessible. In addition to common approaches in information retrieval (like e.g. Boolean logic), more sophisticated query options are needed. Thus, the application of semantic technologies is important for us. Entity-centered methods, similarity-based or complex semantic searches are relevant technologies we are currently investigating.
We are focusing on machine-based indexing and interlinking in the domain of intellectual property, which is codified in patents. This huge body of information is growing rapidly. We are applying methods of natural language processing, text and data mining as well as semantic technologies, deployed on big data infrastructures. We use ontology based methods for annotating relevant entities to achieve a deeper and more precise domain-specific semantic indexing, which improves retrieval with regard to precision and recall.
We are interested in starting an intense and thorough exchange about current approaches and applications in the area of semantic technologies and AI. We will report on our current state of work and plans for future projects in various talks, sessions and workshops throughout the Semantics 2019. Linda Andersson (TU Wien) and my colleague Hidir Aras are organizing the PatentSemTech2019 workshop, covering industry and academia projects within the field of intellectual property. Linda and Hidir are aiming to evolve the workshop into a continuous community activity targeting “patent data”. I'm very curious to see how well this idea resonates with the community. I’m very glad that the Semantics 2019 conference provides us with this excellent and beneficial opportunity for our workshop!
About Leni Helmes
Leni is a member of the management board of FIZ Karlsruhe and as Senior VP she is responsible for IT, Development and Applied Research. She has a PhD in Atmospheric Physics and many years of management experience in IT and software development. She is particularly interested in new methods for processing, indexing and interlinking scientific information, including patents.
About SEMANTiCS
The annual SEMANTiCS conference is the meeting place for professionals who make semantic computing work, and understand its benefits and know its limitations. Every year, SEMANTiCS attracts information managers, IT-architects, software engineers, and researchers, from organisations ranging from NPOs, universities, public administrations to the largest companies in the world. http://www.semantics.cc
