University of Southampton - SOTON

The University of Southampton is one of the most prestigious universities in the United Kingdom, ranked in the top ten of research-led universities in the UK. The academic unit of Electronics and Computer Science has a distinctive reputation for its research, education, and enterprise in Computer Science, Electronics, and Electrical Engineering. The largest school of its kind in the UK, ECS is internationally regarded for its transformative research, and for its ability to define and drive new directions in knowledge transfer and education. In the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise, ECS was ranked joint second in the UK for Computer Science (for quality of research) and Electronics and Electrical Engineering was ranked second in the ‘medals’ table (for high-caliber staff). The school has a world-leading role in developments in the areas of Web Science, Semantic Web, and Linked Data including a Web Science Doctoral Training Centre and the prestigious Web and Internet Science research group, which will be directly involved in the project. Members of the group helped to form the Web as it is today and are helping to evolve and enhance its technologies, and our understanding of it as an organic, human-driven thing. This extends to the socio-political, economic, and legal aspects as well as its use by scientists, researchers and practitioners to further their work.

In SemData, SOTON will build upon this expertise to work on a selection of topics related to the representation and use of semantically enabled content, in particular Linked Data. This includes, most prominently, models and methods to capture and leverage provenance information (WP1), methods for assessing and improving the quality of Web data (WP1), and methods for efficient semantic data management (WP3).