About

From STLab

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What? The Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab), within the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology (ISTC, http://www.istc.cnr.it) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR, http://www.cnr.it), has been founded in the Autumn of 2008, and partly originates from the past Rome branch of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (http://www.loa-cnr.it).

Why? The Lab performs R&D in semantic technologies. Besides its European and Italian research projects, it has one motivating use case in the development of semantic web applications for the CNR scientific organization, jointly with the Information Systems Unit of CNR.

Who? STLab people include either local collaborators working partly or full time for the Lab, or external people that share R&D interests with the Lab (see also people page). The founders are Aldo Gangemi (scientific coordinator), Alfio Gliozzo, Valentina Presutti, and Alberto Salvati (technology coordinator). Local collaborators include also Alessandro Adamou, Andrea Nuzzolese, Eva Blomqvist, Enrico Daga, Stefania Capotosti, Daria Spampinato, Diego Reforgiato, Sergio Consoli.

Know How STLab competences include methods, best practices, tools and reusable models for ontology design, linked data design and analysis, and knowledge extraction that hybridizes ontology and natural language processing.

Themes Current research at STLab (see also research page) focuses on the following aspects of semantic technologies: Semantic Web and Web of Data (Web 3.0); ontology design patterns and best practices; semantic search and corporate knowledge management based on ontologies and Web 3.0; semantic sentiment analysis; collaborative tools for ontology design; adaptive eLearning; semantic interoperability.

Applications Typical application domains include organizational, business, industrial, legal, biomedical, e-government, and agricultural information systems.

Projects People at STLab have participated in the following past semantic technology projects: ESPRIT projects GALEN and GALEN-II (1992-1998), EUREKA project IKF (2000-2004), IST FP5 projects OntoWeb (2001-2004) and WonderWeb (2002-2004), FP5 projects METOKIS (2004-2005) and Semantic Mining (2004-2006), as well as in many industrial and institutional projects and working groups, including W3C, UN-FAO, Italian Council for Informatics in the Public Administration, etc.

STLab has been involved in the FP6 Integrating Project NeOn (Networked Ontologies, 2006-2010), the Leonardo project BONy (2008-2009), and the FP7 Integrating Project IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack, 2009-2012). STLab is also responsible for the CNR research projects: Semantic Technologies and Historical Knowledge Representation.

STLab is currently involved in the Italian Ministry of Research PON PRISMA project, the CNR technology projects e-Government and Digital Libraries, the FILAS Regione Lazio project HERMES, and the Semantic Sicily project.