Section: Overall Objectives

Research Topics

The research objectives of Wimmics can be grouped according to four topics that we identify in reconciling social and formal semantics on the Web:

Topic 1 - users modeling and designing interaction on the Web: The general research question addressed by this objective is “How do we improve our interactions with a semantic and social Web more and more complex and dense ?”. Wimmics focuses on specific sub-questions: “How can we capture and model the users' characteristics?” “How can we represent and reason with the users' profiles?” “How can we adapt the system behaviors as a result?” “How can we design new interaction means?” “How can we evaluate the quality of the interaction designed?”

Topic 2 - communities and social interactions analysis on the Web: The general question addressed in this second objective is “How can we manage the collective activity on social media?”. Wimmics focuses on the following sub-questions: “How do we analyze the social interaction practices and the structures in which these practices take place?” “How do we capture the social interactions and structures?” “How can we formalize the models of these social constructs?” “How can we analyze and reason on these models of the social activity ?”

Topic 3 - vocabularies, semantic Web and linked data based knowledge representation and Artificial Intelligence formalisms on the Web: The general question addressed in this third objective is “What are the needed schemas and extensions of the semantic Web formalisms for our models?”. Wimmics focuses on several sub-questions: “What kinds of formalism are the best suited for the models of the previous section?” “What are the limitations and possible extensions of existing formalisms?” “What are the missing schemas, ontologies, vocabularies?” “What are the links and possible combinations between existing formalisms?” In a nutshell, an important part of this objective is to formalize as typed graphs the models identified in the previous objectives in order for software to exploit them in their processing (in the next objective).

Topic 4 - artificial intelligence processing: learning, analyzing and reasoning on heterogeneous semantic graphs on the Web: The general research question addressed in this last objective is “What are the algorithms required to analyze and reason on the heterogeneous graphs we obtained?”. Wimmics focuses on several sub-questions: ”How do we analyze graphs of different types and their interactions?” “How do we support different graph life-cycles, calculations and characteristics in a coherent and understandable way?” “What kind of algorithms can support the different tasks of our users?”.