Research

I'm currently working at Yahoo! Research Barcelona as a Reseacher in the Search area, with a focus on semantic technologies. Most of the publications, projects and other research results mentioned in this page are an outcome of my PhD at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and therefore not related to my current employment.

From 2002-2007, I worked as a Ph.D. candidate at the Business Informatics group of the Faculty of Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit (aka Free University, Amsterdam) under the guidance of prof. Hans Akkermans (FEW) and prof. Tom Elfring (FSW). I'm also co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge starting from 2006.

For past studies and affiliations, consult my Curriculum Vitae.

My research interests lie on the borderline of the Semantic Web and social network analysis, including

• Applying network analysis to knowledge structures of all kinds (ontologies, folksonomies)
• Social network analysis using Web data

If you have absolutely no clue what I'm talking about, read Tim Berners-Lee's article over the Semantic Web.

Book

You can now order my book Social Networks and the Semantic Web published by Springer Verlag in the series "Semantic Web and Beyond". You can also order it from Amazon.

Awards and affiliations

• My application Flink has won first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge in 2004. The prize was handed out at the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004) held in Hiroshima, Tokyo.
• My paper entitled Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics has received a Best Paper Award at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005), held in Galway, Ireland.
• Since November, 2005 I'm co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge together with Michael Uschold (2006), Jennifer Golbeck (2007) and James Hendler (2008).
• I've been selected as one of AI's "Ten to Watch" by the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal in 2008.
• I'm Editorial Board member of the Journal of Web Semantics, published by Elsevier.

List of Publications

The following list has been generated by openacademia.org, our semantic-based publication management system. It includes metadata in RDFa and using microformats.

• Hugo Zaragoza, Henning Rode, Peter Mika, Jordi Atserias, Massimiliano Ciaramita and Giuseppe Attardi. Ranking very many typed entities on Wikipedia. In: CIKM '07: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, page 1015-1018, New York, NY, USA, ISBN 978-1-59593-803-9, November, 2007
• Michel C.A. Klein, Peter Mika and Stefan Schlobach. Approximate Instance Unification using RoughOWL: Querying with similarity in openacademia. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), 2007
• Peter Mika. Social Networks and the Semantic Web. Book , Semantic Web and Beyond vol. 5, ISBN 978-0-387-71000-6, 2007
• Peter Mika. Social Networks and the Semantic Web. , Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2007
• Peter Mika. Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics. Journal of Web Semantics 5 (1), page 5-15, 2007
• Hans Akkermans and Peter Mika. Ontology Technology, Knowledge Articulation, and Web Innovation, chapter in: Advances in Knowledge Management, Jos Schreinemakers et al. (eds.), 2006
• Peter Mika, Tom Elfring and Peter Groenewegen. Application of semantic technology for social network analysis in the sciences. Scientometrics 68 (1), page 3-27, 2006
• Peter Mika. Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005), Yolanda Gil, Enrico Motta, Richard V. Benjamins and Mark Musen (eds.) , Lecture Notes in Computer Science no. 3729, page 122-136, Galway, Ireland, November, 2005
• Peter Haase, Bjorn Schnizler, Jeen Broekstra, Marc Ehrig, Frank van Harmelen, Maarten Menken, Peter Mika, Michal Plechawski, Pawel Pyszlak, Ronny Siebes, Steffen Staab and Christoph Tempich. Bibster -- A Semantics-Based Bibliographic Peer-to-Peer System. Journal of Web Semantics 2 (1), 2005
• Peter Mika. Flink: Semantic Web Technology for the Extraction and Analysis of Social Networks. Journal of Web Semantics 3 (2), 2005
• Peter Mika. Social Networks and the Semantic Web: The Next Challenge. IEEE Intelligent Systems 20 (1), January/February, 2005
• Peter Haase, Jeen Broekstra, Marc Ehrig, Maarten Menken, Peter Mika, Michal Plechawski, Pawel Pyszlak, Bjorn Schnizler, Ronny Siebes, Steffen Staab and Christoph Tempich. Bibster -- A Semantics-Based Bibliographic Peer-to-Peer System. In: Proceedings of the Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004), Sheila A. McIlraith, Dimitris Plexousakis and Frank van Harmelen (eds.), page 122-136, Hiroshima, Japan, November, 2004
• Peter Mika. Social Networks and the Semantic Web: An Experiment in Online Social Network Analysis. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Beijing, China, September, 2004
• Peter Mika. Bootstrapping the FOAF-web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining. In: 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web, Galway, Ireland, September, 2004
• Peter Mika and Hans Akkermans. Towards a New Synthesis of Ontology Technology and Knowledge Management. Knowledge Engineering Review 19 (4), page 317-345, 2004
• Peter Mika and Aldo Gangemi. Descriptions of Social Relations. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the (Semantic) Web, 2004
• Peter Mika, Marta Sabou, Aldo Gangemi and Daniel Oberle. Foundations for DAML-S: Aligning DAML-S to DOLCE. In: Proceedings of First International Semantic Web Services Symposium (SWS2004), AAAI Spring Symposium Series, 2004
• Peter Mika, Daniel Oberle, Aldo Gangemi and Marta Sabou. Foundations for Service Ontologies: Aligning OWL-S to DOLCE. In: Proceedings of the 13th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), 2004
• Peter Mika. Harnessing Ontologies and PEer-to-peer (HOPE): The SWAP methodology for distributed knowledge management using ontologies and P2P. , December, 2003
• Aldo Gangemi and Peter Mika. Understanding the Semantic Web through Descriptions and Situations. In: On The Move 2003 Conferences (OTM2003), Robert Meersman, Zahir Tari and Douglas Schmidt et al. (eds.), 2003
• Peter Mika, Victor Iosif, York Sure and Hans Akkermans. Ontology-based Content Management in a Virtual Organization, chapter in: Handbook on Ontologies in Information Systems, Steffen Staab and Rudi Struder (eds.) , International Handbooks on Information Systems, page 447-471, 2003
• Peter Mika and Hans Akkermans. Analysis of Ontology-based Knowledge Management. , January, 2003
• Christiaan Fluit, Herko ter Horst, Jos van der Meer, Marta Sabou and Peter Mika. Spectacle, chapter in: Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Management, ISBN 0-470-84867-7, 2003
• Victor Iosif, Peter Mika, Rikard Larsson and Hans Akkermans. Field Experimenting With Semantic Web Tools In A Virtual Organization, chapter in: Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Management, ISBN 0-470-84867-7, 2003
• Victor Iosif and Peter Mika. EnerSearch Virtual Organization Case Study: Evaluation Document. , 2002
• Peter Mika. Integrating Ontology Storage and Ontology-based Applications Through Client-side Query and Transformations. In: Proceedings of Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools (EON2002) workshop at EKAW2002, Siguenza, Spain, 2002
• Peter Mika. JavaServer Pages (In Hungarian.), chapter in: The J2EE Guide for Java Programmers, J. N. Gaizler (eds.), page 115-163, ISBN 963-463-578-4, 2002
• Peter Mika. Applied Ontology-based Knowledge Management: A Report on the State-of-the-Art. MSc thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2002

For publications after March, 2007 please see my profile at Yahoo Research.

Some of my past projects include:

	Flink is a website presenting the social networks and research of the Semantic Web research community. Flink uses Semantic Web technology for the storage, management and visualization of social network data and has won 1st prize at the Semantic Web Challange of 2004. Visit Flink at http://flink.semanticweb.org.
	The open source openacademia.org project offers a set of services for both individual researchers and research groups that allows them to manage publication collections more efficiently using Semantic Web technology. Among others, openacademia.org makes it easy for scientists to dynamically embed their publication list in their homepage and to publicize their publications as RSS feeds. openacademia.org also facilitates the task of aggregating publication lists into a single collection. For more information, please look at openacademia.org
	Elmo is an open source API intended to simplify application developmentwith Sesame. Elmo provides static Java models (JavaBeans) for a number of common domain ontologiessuch as Dublin Core, FOAF and RSS. Elmo also builds on our experience in developing efficient, scalableSemantic Web applications providing features such as configurable caching mechanisms and query expansion facilities. Lastly, Elmo provides a set of tools for common tasks such as crawling for RDF data, smushing (duplicate detection) and validation. Elmo is hosted at openrdf.org, the home of Sesame.
	Social Networks and the Semantic Web. This inter-disciplinary research project is a collaboration within VUBIS (the VU Research School for Business Information Sciences) with the group of prof. dr. Tom Elfring at the Faculty of Social Sciences. The project on one side investigates how the methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA) contribute to the analysis of online communities, with a case study about the Semantic Web research community itself. On the other side, the project looks at how the Semantic Web could benefit from methods of SNA in improving the social aspects of the Semantic Web architecture.
	WonderWeb: Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web. WonderWeb is an EU FET research project running until 2004. WonderWeb delivers important pieces of the SW architecture, including language standardization, foundational methodologies to ontology development, versioning, modularization and an application server for the Semantic Web. My involvement in WonderWeb included work on aligning DAML-S (OWL-S) to the foundational ontology library developed in the project (called DOLCE).
	SWAP: the Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer. SWAP is an EU IST project running until 2004, which attempts to combine two of the greatest hypes of our time. My work in SWAP included Deliverable 1.2 on the Analysis of Ontology-based Knowledge Management, Deliverable 1.4 on SWAP methodology and contributions to both case studies of the project.
	TripleTalk: The Wiki of the AI/BI departments of the Vrije Universiteit. After the failed experiment of the SW@VU, we are now trying the ultimate collaboration tool for knowledge sharing: a wiki.
	On-To-Knowledge: Content-driven Knowledge Management through Evolving Ontologies. On-To-Knowledge was an EU IST project that provided a set of ontology-based tools, a novel ontology representation language (OIL) and a methodology for building ontology-based applications. My work focused on the EnerSearch case study whereby we used On-To-Knowledge technology to build a semantic portal for this research organization in order to improve information retrieval from a fairly large knowledge base that contained scientific publications.
	Internship at AIdministrator (now Aduna). I have spent six month as an intern at the AIdministrator, a small Semantic Web company located in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. The times I spent there have been very fruitful professionally, as I had a chance to work closely with them in implementing my master's work. I also learned a lot about their two key products, the open source Sesame RDF storage and query facility and the Spectacle presentation and visualization platform.
	Master's thesis: Applied Ontology-based Knowledge Management. This work provides a detailed account of the practical experiences that I obtained while building the ontology-based content management system for EnerSearch. My master's work was supervised by Frank van Harmelen.