Sören Auer

Dr. rer. nat. Dipl.-Math.

Senior scientist and head of the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web at InfAI and Business Information Systems / University of Leipzig.

Biographical sketch.

Contact

Research Group Agile Knowledge Engineering & Semantic Web (AKSW)
Institut für Informatik (IfI)
Universität Leipzig
Johannisgasse 26, Room 5-09
04109 Leipzig
Phone: +49 (341) 97-32367
Fax: +49 (341) 97-32329
Jabber: soerenauer@jabber.ccc.de
Skype: soerenauer

Email: auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Research

Research Interests

Knowledge Representation and Management, in particular agile, light-weight methodologies and social semantic collaboration

Semantic Web, in particular the terminological Knowledge Representation standards RDF, RDF-Schema, OWL (W3C)
Software engineering, open-source software, scripting languages and adaptive methodologies and tools (Wikis, eXtreme Programming): SemanticScripting.org
Database and XML technologies
Open, participatory research and development (see my Open Science slides and OpenResearch.org)

Activities

OpenResearch.org - a semantik Wiki for collecting and sharing scientific meta-data such as CfPs, tool descriptions, research profiles, conference statistics etc. (founder)
LinkedData Planet Conference and Expo, New York City (speaker)
Google Summer of Code mentor for Joomla! Foundation for the project Joomla! Semantification
W3C's RDF2RDB Incubator Group (invited expert)
Open Knowledge Foundation - Protecting and Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age (advisory board member)
EU's 6th and 7th framework programs (evaluator and reviewer)
Editorial board member af various journals (IJAESD, Journal of Software Architecture, JITR, IJSR)
PostDoc at Upenn's DB group (2006-2008)
Supervision of doctoral students: Jens Lehmann, Sebastian Dietzold, Thorsten Berger, Sebastian Hellmann, Michael Martin

Conferences / Workshops

Some recent conferences / workshops in which I participate (often as PC member, co-organizer or speaker):

WOD-PD 2008 - Web of Data Practitioners Days, Vienna, Austria - Oct 22-23, 2008
Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge in conjunction with I-Semantics 2008, 3-5 September 2008, Messe Center Graz, Austria.
Nutzerinteraktion im Social Semantic Web at "Mensch und Computer Conference", 7th September, 2008, Lübeck, Germany
International Workshop on Interacting with Multimedia Content in the Social Semantic Web (IMC-SSW 2008), Collocated with SAMT 2008, Koblenz, Germany, Dez 3rd 2008
Semantic Authoring, Annotation and Knowledge Markup Workshop joint event with EKAW 2008, Acitrezza, Catania, Italy, 28th September 2008.
Social Data on the Web (SDOW 2008) workshop at 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008), Oct 26 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany.
IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Beijing, China, September 23-26, 2008.
AST 2008 - Applications of Semantic Technologies
I-Semantics 2008
4th Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web at European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008)
3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop at European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008)
6th International Semantic Web Conference, Busan, South Korea, 11.-15. November, 2007
Conference on Social Semantic Web co-located with SABRE - Software, Agents and Services for Business, Research, and E-Sciences, Leipzig, 24.-28. September, 2007

Projects

I'm involved (either as founder, collaborator or advisory board member) in the following projects:

Triplify.org - provides a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications. Triplify is a small plugin for Web applications, which reveals the semantic structures encoded in relational databases by making database content available as RDF, JSON or Linked Data.
DBpedia.org - community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web
Powl/OntoWiki - Platform for social, semantic collaboration and Semantic Web (Application) Development, Open-Source Software
Cofundos.org - pooling innovative ideas and resources for the development of open-source software
XML2OWL - transforming XML documents into OWL using XSLT, Interactive demonstrator available at http://xml2owl.sf.net
Research projects:
- OntoWiki - Semantic Collaboration for Enterprise Knowledge Management, E-Learning and E-Tourism
  EU FP7 funded
- SoftWiki - End-user driven, distributed Requirements Engineering for agile, evolutionary Software Development
  BmbF funded, 2006-2009
- SHARQ (Sharing Heterogeneous, Autonomous Resources and Queries)

For further information on projects of my research group please go to: http://aksw.org.

Publications

2008

Sebastian Dietzold, Jörg Unbehauen, Sören Auer: xOperator - An extensible Semantic Agent for Instant Messaging Networks.
To appear in Proceedings of 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), 1-5 June, 2008, Tenerife, Spain.
Auer, S.; Braun-Thürmann, H.: Towards Bottom-Up, Stakeholder-Driven Research Funding - Open Source Funding, Open Peer Review. (Slides)
In Peer Review Reviewed: The International Career of a Quality-control Instrument and New Challenges 24-25 April 2008, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), Berlin.
Auer, S.: Endanwendergetriebene Open-source Softwareentwicklung mit Cofundos.
In Bärwolff, Matthias and Gehring, Robert A. and Lutterbeck, Bernd, Eds. Open Source Jahrbuch 2008. Lehmanns Media.

2007

Auer, S.; Bizer, C.; Lehmann, J.; Kobilarov, G.; Cyganiak, R.; Ives, Z.: DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data.
In Aberer et al. (Eds.): The Semantic Web, 6th International Semantic Web Conference, 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007 + ASWC 2007, Busan, Korea, November 11-15, 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4825 Springer 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-76297-3.
Sören Auer and Zachary Ives. Integrating ontologies and relational data.
Technical Report MS-CIS-07-24, Computer and Information Sciences Department, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, Oct 2007.
Weiske, C.; Auer, S.: Implementing SPARQL Support for Relational Databases and Possible Enhancements.
Proceedings of 1st Conference on Social Semantic Web. Leipzig (CSSW'07), 24.-28. September, 2007. Volume P-113 of GI-Edition - Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). Bonner Köllen Verlag, ISSN 1617-5468, ISBN 978-3-88579-207-9.
Riechert, T.; Auer, S.; Lehmann, J.: Towards Semantic based Requirements Engineering.
Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management. I-KNOW'07, 5-7 September, Graz, Austria.
Dietzold, J.; Auer, S.: Accessing RDF Knowledge Bases via LDAP Clients.
7th International Conference on Knowledge Management. I-KNOW'07, 5-7 September, Graz, Austria.
Lehmann, J.; Schüppel, J.; Auer, S.: Discovering Unknown Connections - the DBpedia Relationship Finder.
Proceedings of 1st Conference on Social Semantic Web. Leipzig (CSSW'07), 24.-28. September, 2007. Volume P-113 of GI-Edition - Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). Bonner Köllen Verlag, ISSN 1617-5468, ISBN 978-3-88579-207-9.
Auer, S.; Lehmann, J.: What have Innsbruck and Leipzig in common? Extracting Semantics from Wiki Content. In Franconi et al. (eds), Proceedings of European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC'07), LNCS 4519, pp. 503-517, Springer, 2007.
Bizer, C.; Cyganiak, R.; Auer, S.; Kobilarov, G.: DBpedia.org - Querying Wikipedia like a Database.
Developers track at 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), Banff, Canada, May 2007.
Dietzold, S.; Auer, S.: Integrating SPARQL Endpoints into Directory Services.
Proc. of Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop at the ESWC, Innsbruck, Austria, May 30, 2007, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-248/challenge5.pdf
Auer, S.; Bizer, C.; Müller, C.; Zhdanova, A.: Proc. of 1st Conference on Social Semantic Web.
Co-located with SABRE - Software, Agents and Services for Business, Research, and E-Sciences, Leipzig, 24.-28. September, 2007. To appear in Volume P-113 of GI-Edition - Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). Bonner Köllen Verlag, ISSN 1617-5468, ISBN 978-3-88579-207-9. BIB
Auer, S.; Bizer, C.; Heath; T.; Grimmnes, G. A. (eds.): Proc. of Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop at the ESWC,
Innsbruck, Austria, May 30, 2007, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-248/. BIB

2006

Decker, S.; Park, J.; Sauermann, L.; Auer, S.; Handschuh, S.: Proceedings of the Semantic Desktop and Social Semantic Collaboration Workshop (SemDesk 2006)
located at 5th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2005, 6th November 2006, Athens, GA, USA, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-202.
Ahtisham, A.; Herrmann, M.; Auer, S.; Golden, R.: Real-life SOA Experiences and an Approach Towards Semantic SOA.
Proceedings of 4th International Workshop on SOA and Web Services in conjunction with ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, October 22-26, Portland, Oregon, USA, ISBN 82-997428-0-3, pp. 72-81.
Auer, S.; Dietzold, S.; Riechert, T.: OntoWiki - A Tool for Social, Semantic Collaboration.
In I. Cruz et al. (Eds.): Proceedings of 5th International Semantic Web Conference, Nov 5th-9th, Athens, GA, USA, LNCS 4273, pp. 736.749, 2006. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.
Auer, S.; Riechert, T.; Fährich, K.-P.: SoftWiki - Agiles Requirements-Engineering für Softwareprojekte mit einer großen Anzahl verteilter Stakeholder.
accepted at GeNeMe'06 - Gemeinschaft in neuen Medien, 29. Sep. 2006, Dresden, Germany.
Dietzold, S.; Auer, S.; Riechert, T.: Kolloborative Wissensarbeit mit OntoWiki
Workshop Bildung von Sozialen Netzwerken in Anwendungen der "Social Software", 6. 10. 2006, Dresden, Germany.
Kunze, J.; Riechert, T.; Auer, S.: Eine Schnittstelle für Arztpraxisdaten mittels einer Ontologie auf Basis von HL7 Version 3.
accepted at XML-Tage, Berlin, 25.-27. Sep. 2006.
Ahtisham, A.; Auer, S.; Shen, J.; Hermann, M.: Expressing Business Process Models as OWL-S Ontologies
Grid and Peer-to-Peer based Workflows (GPWW), September 4th 2006, Vienna, Austria. In J. Eder, S. Dustdar et al. (Eds.): BPM 2006 Workshops, LNCS 4103, 2006. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.
Auer, S.; Fährich, K.-P.: SoftWiki - Agiles Requirements-Engineering für Softwareprojekte mit einer großen Anzahl verteilter Stakeholder.
Statuskonferenz Forschungsoffensive "Software Engineering 2006", 26.-28. Juni 2006, Leipzig.
Auer, S.; Herre, H.: A Versioning and Evolution Framework for RDF Knowledge Bases.
to appear in proceedings of Sixth International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference - Perspectives of System Informatics, 27-30 June 2006, Novosibirsk, Akademgorodok, Russia.
Auer, S.: RapidOWL - an Agile Knowledge Engineering Methodology.
to appear in proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications (STICA 06)
Dietzold, S.; Auer, S.: Access Control on RDF Triple Stores from a Semantic Wiki Perspective.
Proc. of Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop at the ESWC, Budva, Montenegro, June 12, 2006, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-181/paper1.pdf
Auer, S.; Bizer, C.; Miller; L. (eds.): Scripting for the Semantic Web 2006.
Proc. of ESWC'06 Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW'05), Budva, Montenegro, June 12, 2006,
CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-181/.

2005

Aumueller, D.; Auer, S.: Towards a Semantic Wiki Experience - Desktop Integration and Interactivity in WikSAR.
Proc. of 1st Workshop on The Semantic Desktop - Next Generation Personal Information Management and Collaboration Infrastructure, Galway, Ireland, Nov. 6th, 2005.
Auer, S.; Bizer, C.; Miller; L. (eds.): Scripting for the Semantic Web 2005.
Proc. 1st Intl. Workshop Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW'05), Hersonissos, Greece, May 30, 2005,
CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-135/.
Auer, S.: Powl - A Web Based Platform for Collaborative Semantic Web Development.
Proc. of 1st Workshop Workshop Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW'05), Hersonissos, Greece, May 30, 2005,
CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-135/paper9.pdf.
Bohring, H.; Auer, S.: Mapping XML to OWL Ontologies.
To appear in Proceedings of 13. Leipziger Informatik-Tage (LIT 2005), Sep. 21-23, 2005, Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI).
Auer, S.; Pieterse, B.: "Vernetzte Kirche": Building a Semantic Web
To appear in Proceedings of ISWC Workshop Semantic Web Case Studies and Best Practices for eBusiness (SWCASE05), Galway, Ireland, 2005 Nov. 7th

2004

Auer, S.; Burek, P.; Grawe, T.: Knowledge Engineering for IT-based Services
Proceedings of I-KNOW '04 - 4th International Conference on Knowledge Management.
Auer, S.; Böhm, K., Thrähnert, M.: Enhancing Software Engineering with Ontological Knowledge
in Fähnrich, K.-P.; Meiren, T. (Hrsg.): Computer Aided Engineering für IT-basierte Dienstleistungen; ISBN: 3-934178-39-1; 2004
Beck, N.; Auer, S.: Semantic Web Content Management
in Fähnrich, K.-P. (Hrsg.): Von e-Learning bis e-Payment : Das Internet als sicherer Marktplatz; ISBN: 3-898380-57-2; 2004

2003

Auer, S.; Fähnrich K.-P.: A Strategy for Formal Service Product Model Specification.
Human Computer Interaction, International Proceedings. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.
Auer, S.; Fähnrich K.-P.: Product Models in Service Engineering.
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Production Research.
Auer, S.; Pfretzschner, P.: Strategies for Modelling and Representing Knowledge about Variant Rich Service Products
in Fähnrich, K.-P.; Herre, H.: Content- und Wissensmanagement; ISBN: 3-934178-26-X; 2003