Bernhard Haslhofer

University of Vienna, Computer Science

Währingerstrasse 29 A-1090 Vienna Austria

Phone: +43 (1) 4277 78840 Email: bernhard.haslhofer@univie.ac.at
Find me elsewhere: twitter, slideshare, github

My research interest lies in the area of global data networks and their cultural, social, and technological contexts. I design, build, and experiment with Web-based data infrastructures, work on solutions for assessing and maintaining data quality in such environments, and examine how open data could be used in systems and applications. In my current research, I investigate how open data and algorithms built on the principles of openness and decentralization could support scholarship and, vice versa, how knowledge and artifacts produced in the scholarship cycle could flow into broader, possibly open data and knowledge networks.

In the SciLink project we investigate how we could integrate building blocks of scholarly communication (e.g., scientific papers, datasets) into a globally connected data network. In Maphub we experiment with Open Annotations and Semantic Tagging in the context of historical maps. In ResourceSync we work on mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of Web resources. With qSKOS we support people in identifying quality issues in Web vocabularies and with Lucene-SKOS we enable query expansion and reformulation based on open Web data.

Previously, I contributed to Meketre, which aims at helping Egyptologists to organize, analyze, and share collected materials and data. I also co-designed and built the Europeana Linked Open Data prototype. During my PhD work at the University of Vienna, I designed and implemented a mapping framework for heterogeneous Web data and developed OAI2LOD for publishing OAI-PMH data sources as Linked Open Data.

Short Bio

Bernhard Haslhofer is an EU Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna. Previously he worked as Lecturer and Postdoc Associate at Cornell University Information Science, received his PhD from the University of Vienna, and a masters degree and diploma in Economics and Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna. His research interest lie in the area of global data networks and their cultural, social, and technological contexts. He designs, builds, and experiments with Web-based data infrastructures, works on solutions for assessing and maintaining data quality in such environments, and examines how open data could be used in systems and applications. In his current research, he investigate how open data and algorithms built on the principles of openness and decentralization could support scholarship and, vice versa, how knowledge and artifacts produced in the scholarship cycle could flow into broader, possibly open data and knowledge networks.

Recent Publications (see all ...)

Haslhofer, Bernhard and Martins, Flávio and Magalhães, João: Using SKOS vocabularies for improving Web Search. In: Web of Linked Entities (WoLE) Workshop, co-located with WWW 2013, Rio de Janeiro (2013)

Murnane, Elizabeth L and Haslhofer, Bernhard and Lagoze, Carl: RESLVE: Leveraging User Interest to Improve Entity Disambiguation on Short Text. In: Web of Linked Entities (WoLE) Workshop, co-located with WWW 2013, Rio de Janeiro (2013) (Best Paper)

Murnane, Elizabeth L and Haslhofer, Bernhard and Lagoze, Carl: RESLVE: Leveraging User Interest to Improve Entity Disambiguation on Short Text. In: WWW 2013, Poster Track, Rio de Janeiro (2013)

Haslhofer, Bernhard and Warner, Simeon and Lagoze, Carl and Klein, Martin and Sanderson, Robert and Nelson, Michael L and Van de Sompel, Herbert: ResourceSync: Leveraging Sitemaps for Resource Synchronization. In: WWW 2013, Developers Track, Rio de Janeiro (2013)

Haslhofer, Bernhard and Robitza, Werner and Lagoze, Carl and Guimbretiere, Francois: Semantic Tagging on Historical Maps. In: In: ACM Web Science 2013, Paris (2013)

Klein, Martin and Sanderson, Robert and Van de Sompel, Herbert and Warner, Simeon and Haslhofer, Bernhard and Lagoze, Carl and Nelson, Michael L: A Technical Framework for Resource Synchronization. In: D-Lib Magazine, 19 (1). p. 3 (2013)

Isaac, Antoine and Clayphan, Robina and Haslhofer, Bernhard Europeana: Moving to Linked Open Data. In: Information Standards Quarterly Vol. 24, Issue 2/3, 2012

Mader, Christian and Haslhofer, Bernhard and Isaac, Antoine Finding Quality Issues in SKOS Vocabularies. In: TPDL 2012 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, pg. 222-233, 2012, Springer Berlin/Heidelberg

Haslhofer, Bernhard and Sanderson, Robert and Simon, Rainer and van de Sompel, Herbert Open annotations on multimedia Web resources In: Multimedia Tools and Applications, pp. 1-21 ISSN 1380-7501, 2012

Specifications

ResourceSync Framework Specification (editor): describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third party systems to remain synchronized with a server's evolving resources.

Open Annotation Data Model (contributor): specifies an interoperable framework for creating associations between related resources, annotations, using a methodology that conforms to the Architecture of the World Wide Web. Open Annotations can easily be shared between platforms, with sufficient richness of expression to satisfy complex requirements while remaining simple enough to also allow for the most common use cases, such as attaching a piece of text to a single web resource.

Teaching

Fall 2012 (Cornell)

INFO/CS 4302 - Web Information Systems, instructor. This course introduces technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, show the practical applications of such systems, and discuss their design and their social and policy context by examining cross-cutting issues such as citizen science, data journalism and open government.

INFO 5900 - Independent Research, instructor.

Spring 2012 (Cornell)

CS 5999 - Master of Engineering Project, co-instructor.

Fall 2011 (Cornell)

INFO/CS 4302 - Web Information Systems, co-instructor. Examines technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, discusses the social and policy context from which they arose, shows the practical applications of such systems, and go into cross-cutting issues in this context. Topics: Internet and Web foundations, structured Web data, RESTful Web Services, Linked Data, Knowledge Organization on the Web, Citizen Science, Human Computation.

CS 5999 - Master of Engineering Project, co-instructor.

Before (University of Vienna)

Multimedia Information Systems 2 (2007-2011), co-instructor. A masters-level course in Media Informatics examining technologies and available applications for building (multimedia) Web information systems. Focus on XML, Semantic Web technologies and, metadata standards.

Multimedia Information Retrieval (2009-2011), co-instructor. An advanced masters-level course focusing on the principles of information retrieval in distributed environments such as the Web, with a special focus on multimedia information.

Information System Technologies for Multimedia Applications (2008-2010). An undergraduate course focusing on the technical properties of various media types (image, audio, video) and their technical processing (e.g., with Java Media Framework) in multimedia applications.

Media Informatics Student Projects (2008-2011).

Modeling Techniques and Methods (2007-2011), co-instructor. An undergraduate introductory course covering basic data modeling standards such as EER, UML, etc.

Grants and Projects

ResourceSync (12/2011 - ongoing), a joint NISO and Open Archives Initiative (OAI) project funded by the Sloan Foundation. In this project we research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project will enhance that specification using modern web technologies, but will allow for the synchronization of the objects themselves, not just their metadata.

SciLink (03/2011 - ongoing), an EU PEOPLE International Outgoing Fellowship (Marie Curie) grant carried out at Cornell University and the University of Vienna. Research on (i) interactive links discovery in scholarly publication processes, (ii) strategies for maintaining link integrity, and (iii) novel Web-based resource aggregation and presentation interfaces for scholarly publication workflows.

Maphub (12/2011 - 02/2013), an experiment funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We examine the application of Open Annotations in the context of historic map material. Our goal is to design and build a collaborative Web environment in which scholars and citizens can contribute their knowledge to digitized high-resolution online maps. We experiment with designs that integrate the annotation process with the re-use of data from public data sources, such as Wikipedia.

MEKETRE (07/2009 - 12/2012), an interdisciplinary Austrian Research Fund (FWF) project with the Institute for Egyptology at the University of Vienna. It aims at building a collaborative Web-based solution for efficiently organizing the collected and digitized content objects from the Egyptian middle kingdom period by means of open collaboratively developed vocabularies.

EuropeanaConnect (05/2009 - 10/2011), an EU eContentplus funded project that supports the development of Europeana, which enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections

Awards

Open Humanities Award, 2013

"Certificate of Appreciation", awarded by the University of Vienna, Faculty of computer science. 2010, 2011

Invited Talks / Research Visit / etc.

Maphub and Annotorious. iAnnotate 2013. San Francisco, USA. (slides)

Maphub - Annotations and Semantic Tags on Historical Maps. Stanford University - Open Annotation Rollout. 2013, Palo Alto, USA. (slides)

Old Maps, Annotations, and Open Data Networks. Harvard University. 2013, Cambridge, USA. (slides)

Research Visit Los Alamos National Labs, May 2012

Linked Data and SKOS. 2011 Workshop on Physics Classification. 2011, Boston, USA. (slides)

Linked Data in Scholarly Communication. AAHEP5 Information Provider Summit, Cornell University. 2011, Ithaca, USA. (slides)

Metadata is back! Keynote at Semantic Web Technologies for Libraries and Readers Workshop. JCDL 2011, Ottawa, Canada. (slides)

Research on Scholarly Practices and Communication at Cornell Information Science. (with Carl Lagoze) Microsoft Research, 2011. USA. (video)

Linked Data als Perspektive für die bibliothekarische Inhaltserschließung. (German) Österreichisches Online-Informationstreffen und Österreichischer Dokumentartag (ODOK), 2010, Leoben, Austria. (slides)

Linked Data im Kontext Digitaler Bibliothekssysteme. (German) Semantic Web in Bibliotheken (SWIB), 2009, Cologne, Germany. (slides)

CIDOC CRM in Practice - Experiences, Problems, and Possible Solutions. Workshop Vernetzte Datenwelten, Deutschen Archäologisches Institut (DAI), 2009, Berlin, Germany. (slides)

Linked Data Tutorial. Vlaams Theater Instituut, 2009, Brussels, Belgium. (slides)