Home | ISWS25

ISWS25
International Semantic Web Research Summer School

Knowledge graphs for reliable AI

Bertinoro, Italy

June 8 - 14, 2025

Application deadline: March 15th, 2025

Acceptance notification: April 1st, 2025

about

What is ISWS?

One week of intense research

June 8 - 14, 2025

ISWS is a full immersion, super intensive one-week experience including lectures and keynotes from outstanding speakers, a “learning by doing” teamwork program on open research problems, under the guidance of the best scientists in the field, with whom you will co-author a white paper of high potential impact.

ISWS means networking and becoming friends with your peers as well as senior scientists, and have lots of fun with them. At ISWS we shape the future generation of semantic web researchers with creativity, methodology, fun and rigour.

Apply

Fill the student application form

Fees and Grants

To participate in the regular selection process, you need to make sure that you can cover your participation costs. Notice that the ISWS registration fee (1100 €) covers everything – lectures, accommodation, meals and social activities – but the traveling costs, which are excluded.

The ISWS call for applications includes the possibility to apply for a grant, in the situation that you can attend the school only with that support. Each grant will only cover registration costs, meaning that applicants must cover their traveling costs (train/flight tickets). We expect to have a very limited number of grants, chances to get one is usually less than 10%.

If you apply for a grant, it means you can only participate in ISWS in the case of having a grant assigned. By applying for a grant, you will enter a much more competitive process. Please note that ISWS DOES NOT ALLOW to move from the regular selection process to the grant selection process and vice versa. This is because we want to make sure to give grants only to students who would not be able to attend otherwise. On the other hand, the student has also to renounce to participate in the school if the grant is not assigned to her.

Cancellation Policy

Fees are not refundable.

Student Background and Required Knowledge

We welcome applicants from anywhere in the world and with whatever background; however, acquaintance with Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, etc.) is required. In order to ensure a high ratio between tutors and students, the school will be limited to 60 participants.

Commitment and Social Activities

ISWS is not comparable to any other summer school. Students should keep in mind that we will not consider applications from students or applicants who cannot commit themselves to a full participation for the whole duration of the school – i.e., it is a requirement for acceptance that applicants commit to:

arrive at the school on Sunday, June 8th, between 3 pm and 6 pm
participate fully in the activities of the school including social and training activities until its conclusion
leave the venue no earlier than 2 pm on Saturday, June 14th (meaning that your return flight cannot be scheduled before 5 pm)

Note also that students will share a room with one other student. Apart from activities directly related to lectures, the summer school schedule features a rich social programme, which enables informal interaction between all participants in the school, i.e., students, tutors, invited speakers, school staff, etc. These events include a gala dinner, a party, and sport activities.

*Should you complete the contact form, we will collect the data entered on the form, including the contact details you provide, to give you feedback on the selection process and for any follow-up questions. We do not share this information without your permission. We will, therefore, process any data you enter onto the contact form only with your consent per Art. 6 (1)(a) GDPR. You may revoke your consent at any time. An informal email making this request is sufficient. The data processed before we receive your request may still be legally processed. We will retain the data you provide on the contact form until you request its deletion, revoke your consent for its storage, or the purpose for its storage no longer pertains (e.g. after fulfilling your request). Any mandatory statutory provisions, especially those regarding mandatory data retention periods, remain unaffected by this provision.

Directors

Valentina Presutti

Valentina Presutti coordinates STLAB at CNR in Rome. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science (2006) at University of Bologna (Italy). She has coordinated, and worked as researcher in, many national and European projects. She co-directs ISWS. She is editorial board member of Journal of Web Semantics, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Data Intelligence Journal, Intelligenza Artificiale. She has been involved in the organisation of ISWC and ESWC and she is senior PC for IJCAI. She is one of the creators of the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative and of the workshop series on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP). She has 100+ international publications semantic web, knowledge extraction, and ontology design. She teaches Social Robotics and Programming as adjunct professor at University of Bologna. Her research interests stand at the crossing between semantic web and artificial intelligence and include knowledge graphs, empirical analysis of the semantic web, social robotics.

Harald Sack

Harald Sack is Full Professor of Information Service Engineering at FIZ Karlsruhe, Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB). His research interests are semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, deep learning, and knowledge mining. After obtaining a PhD in computer science at the University of Trier, Germany, and his postdoc research at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, he built up the “Semantic Technologies and Multimedia Retrieval” department at Hasso Plattner Institute for IT Systems Engineering in Potsdam, Germany. In 2016, he was appointed as professor at FIZ Karlsruhe and the Institute AIFB/KIT.

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organizers

Local organization

Eleonora Marzi

Eleonora Marzi is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at University of Bologna. Her research fields concern Terminology, Corpus Linguistics, knowledge representation Critical Discourse Analysis. She is also interested in Semantic Web technologies especially for modeling lexical resources.

Roberta Partisani

Roberta Partisani, local organizer of ISWS, started her job at the Organizing Secretariat of the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro after her degree in Sociology. She’s specialized in the organization of several kind of events: summer schools, international congresses, conventions, etc. Since 5 years she’s the reference person for all the events organised and supported by BiCI: the Bertinoro International Centre of Informatics.

Martina Sangiovanni

Martina Sangiovanni has been working within the communication and administration area for the Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab) of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the National Research Council (CNR) since October 2014. She also works for Bup Solution, taking care of the graphics and communications.In 2015 she graduated in Theories and Methods of Communication at the University of Milan. She is passionate about graphic design, video editing, social media and event organisation, and takes care of dissemination actions through press releases and social networks.

Assistant tutors

Nicolas Lazzari

Nicolas is a national PhD student in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pisa and the University of Bologna. His PhD project focuses on the design and adaptation of generative models to support the creative process of artists. His research interests include Ontology Design, Knowledge Representation, Computational Creativity, Computational Musicology and Neurosymbolic methods.

Arianna Graciotti

Arianna attained a MA in Linguistics at the University of Bologna, where she developed a strong interest in the intersection between language and technology. After her degree, she started a career in Computational Linguistics. She worked as a Solutions Consultant at a leading NLP company. In this role, she coordinated the successful delivery of AI solutions for the automation of language-intensive processes. She is a PhD student at the University of Bologna, enrolled in the Computer Science and Engineering program and involved in Polifonia H2020 Project. Her project, at the crossroads of Natural Language Understanding and Semantic Web, focuses on knowledge extraction from multilingual and historical documents.

Ebrahim Norouzi

Ebrahim Norouzi is a PhD student at the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and a Junior Researcher at FIZ Karlsruhe supervised by Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. His work bridges Machine Learning, Semantic Web, and Materials Science, with expertise in data science, knowledge graphs, and materials informatics.

Sarah Ondraszek

Sarah Ondraszek has been working as a junior researcher/PhD student in the Information Service Engineering (ISE) group at FIZ Karlsruhe / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) since November 2023. She holds a Bachelor's in Computational Linguistics and French Philology and a Master's in Digital Humanities (DH) from the University of Trier. Her research interests focus on the application of neurosymbolic AI to cultural heritage and DH.

Beatrice Fiumanò

Beatrice is a PhD student at the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on leveraging and developing NLP techniques to address research questions and challenges in the Humanities and Social Sciences. For her research project, she works on identifying a computational methodology for the analysis of political and institutional discourse, with a particular focus on historical data, exploring issues such as framing, bias and the language-power interplay. Her research interests include Computational Linguistics, Computational Social Sciences, and Semantic Technologies.

tutors

Tutors

Valentina Presutti

Harald Sack

John Domingue

John Domingue holds a position of Professor of Computer Science, at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Open University’s technology research and innovation centre. He also serves as the chair of the ESWC conference series. With a career including serving as KMi Director from 2015 to 2022, Prof. Domingue has contributed 250 refereed articles in fields such as semantics, AI, the Web, distributed ledgers, and eLearning.

From 2017 to 2021, he led the first of five themes, on University Learners, for the £40M Institute of Coding, an initiative aimed at increasing the number and diversity of computing graduates in the UK while strengthening the connection between university teaching and corporate training. Between 2022 and 2023, John spearheaded a project to develop a smart national educational content platform that incorporated cutting-edge AI techniques to support further education educators. Since the beginning of 2023, he has been at the forefront of examining the impact of Generative AI on higher education including a UKRI funded project (SAGE-RAI) with the Open Data Institute.

John has also worked extensively on how distributed ledgers and blockchains can support academic and health credentialing in a decentralised fashion.

John has delivered numerous talks on his work, including appearances at the Royal Institution in 2018, TEDx, and featured in THE Campus on interdisciplinary research teams. In 2019, he was inducted as a Fellow of the British Blockchain Association, and in 2020, he became an Honorary Professor at Amity University.

To learn more about his work, visit kmi.open.ac.uk/people/domingue or follow him on X/Twitter: @johndmk or linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-domingue/.

Claudia d’Amato

Claudia d’Amato is associate professor at the University of Bari – Computer Science Department and she got the Italian Habilitation for the functions of Full Professor for the Scientific Sector “09/H1 – Information Processing Systems ” on April 14th, 2021 and for the Scientific Sector “01/B1 – Informatics” on April 29th, 2021. She obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Bari, Italy, defending the thesis titled “Similarity Based Learning Methods for th Semantic Web. She pioneered the research on Machine Learning methods for ontology mining and Knowledge Graphs that still represents her main research interest. She is member of the editorial board of the Semantic Web Journal and the Journal of Web Semantics. She served/is serving as General Chair for ISWC 2022, Program Chair for ISWC 2017, ESWC 2014, Vice-Chair for ISWC 2009, Journal Track chair for TheWebConf 2018 (previously WWW), Tutorial Chair for ECAI 2020, Machine Learning Track Chair for ESWC’12-’13-’16-’17 and PhD Symposium chair at ESWC’15-’21. She served/is serving as a program committee member of a number of international conferences in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Semantic Web such as AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, ECML, ISWC, TheWebConf, ESWC.

Sebastian Rudolph

Sebastian obtained a PhD in Mathematics from TU Dresden in 2006, before joining Rudi Studer’s Knowledge Management Group in Karlsruhe, where he received his habilitation in Computer Science in 2011. Since 2013, he is a full professor for computational logic at TU Dresden. His main research interests comprise Artificial Intelligence (especially Knowledge Representation and Reasoning), Database Theory, NLP and others. Research stays have lead Sebastian to places as diverse as Oxford, Montpellier, Rennes, Santiago de Chile and Vienna. Sebastian co-authored several textbooks on Semantic Web technologies. In 2018, Sebastian was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to support his research on the decidability boundaries of logic-based Knowledge Representation.

Heiko Paulheim

Heiko is a professor for Data Science at University of Mannheim. He holds a PhD from the Technical University in Darmstadt. His research topics include the creation and integration of large Semantic Web Knowledge Graphs and their use in intelligent applications, as well as ontology matching and learning, and, more recently, societal impacts of artificial intelligence. His group has published open knowledge graphs, such as CaLiGraph and DBkWik, as well as tools and software such as the Knowledge Graph package for Python and the knowledge graph embedding framework RDF2vec. Heiko has been part of the organizing committee at ISWC and ESWC in various roles, has co-organized various workshops, including Know@LOD (Knowledge Discovery meets Linked Open Data), CSSA (Combining Symbolic and Subsymbolic Methods and their Applications), and LD4IE (Linked Data for Information Extraction) series, and served as a PC member at major conferences in the field, such as ISWC, ESWC, ACM Hypertext, AAAI, ECAI, WIMS, and I-SEMANTICS, among others.

Irene Celino

Irene Celino is the Head of the Knowledge Technologies group at Cefriel. Her research activities cover two main trends: Human Computation (AI user acceptance, human-in-the-loop machine learning, user engagement for data management via citizen science and crowdsourcing) and Semantic Web (data fabric and data spaces, data harmonization and semantic interoperability), with focus on the application of such technologies to the development of web applications, especially in Smart City and Communities scenarios. She has 15+ years of experience in cooperative research projects, both at National/Regional level and at European level within FP6, FP7, H2020 and EIT (Digital, manufacturing, Urban Mobility). She is author of 100+ peer-reviewed scientific publications. With her team, she won the Semantic Web Challenge in 2011 and 2015, the AI Mashup Challenge in 2011 and the Big Data Challenge in 2014.

Jan-Christoph Kalo

Jan-Christoph Kalo obtained a Ph.D. from TU Braunschweig, Germany. Between 2021 and 2023 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Learning and Reasoning Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since 2023 he is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on knowledge graphs, data integration, and querying. His main research focus is the combination of large language models and knowledge graphs. He is co-organizer of the LM-KBC challenge and KBC-LM workshop at International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC).

Aidan Hogan

Aidan Hogan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, and an Associate Researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). His research interests relate primarily to the Semantic Web, Databases and Information Extraction; he has published over one hundred peer-reviewed works on these topics. Within these areas, he particularly enjoys research on topics that bridge theory and practice. He has been invited as a tutor to eight summer schools and he has co-organised three summer schools. He is an author or lead author of three books, the latest of which, entitled “Knowledge Graphs”, is published with Morgan & Claypool, and is available for free online (https://kgbook.org/).

Stefano De Giorgis

Stefano De Giorgis earned his PhD in Knowledge Representation and Digital Humanities at University of Bologna, currently he is a post-doc at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR). His research fields concern Knowledge Representation with a particular focus on Cognitive Semantics, Frame Semantics, and grounded world models for neuro-symbolic AI. He is also interested in Semantic Technologies, Digital Humanities, and Cognitive Robotics.

Lise Stork

Lise Stork received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Utrecht, with a focus on language and linguistics, and in 2016 a Master of Science in Media Technology at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), where she also received her PhD, applying Semantic Web and Computer Vision technologies for Information Extraction from image collections from the field of natural history. She has been part of the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (and later, the Knowledge in AI group) where she used AI techniques to prepare scholarly data for knowledge discovery in the MUHAI project, with a focus on human-centric AI. Recently she joined the INDElab as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she works with scholarly data for preservation of knowledge and knowledge discovery.

keynotes

Keynotes

Natasha Noy

Natasha Noy is a scientist at Google Research where she works on making structured data accessible and useful. She leads the team building Dataset Search, a search engine for all the datasets on the Web. Prior to joining Google, she worked at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research where she made major contributions in the areas of ontology development and alignment, and collaborative ontology engineering. Natasha is a Fellow of AAAI and ACM.

Enrico Motta

Enrico Motta is a Professor of Knowledge Technologies at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the UK’s Open University. He is an internationally recognised expert in semantic technologies, regularly included in academic rankings of top computer science researchers. His work has a strong interdisciplinary element, covering Data Integration and Modelling, Human-Computer Interaction, and a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) areas. These include Semantic and Language Technologies, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Intelligent Systems and Robotics. In these areas, he has published over 400 papers and his h-index is 74. His current work focuses on hybrid computational architectures integrating machine learning with other components, which take advantage of explicit representations of knowledge. This is a line of research that he pioneered years ago, when the explosion of (semantic) web data introduced the need for computational solutions able to integrate the large-scale analytical capabilities of machine learning systems with the accuracy and explainability of symbolic, knowledge-based approaches. This approach is currently being applied in a variety of application domains, including news and scholarly analytics, and cognitive robotics.

Frank van Harmelen

Frank van Harmelen is professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he co-leads the Learning and Reasoning group (https://lr.cs.vu.nl), which aims to combine knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches to AI. He has been involved in the Semantic Web research programme since its inception in the late ’90s. He is one of the co-designers of the W3C ontology representation language OWL, he was involved in the design of Sesame, one of the early query engines for knowledge graphs, and he co-authored the Semantic Web Primer, which was the first textbook on Semantic Web technologies. He is currently the principal investigator of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre, a large Dutch national research programme investigating AI systems that collaborate with people instead of replacing them (https://www.hybrid-intelligence-centre.nl/). He received the 2012 “ISWC 10 year impact award”, he has been elected member of the European Academy of Science in 2014, of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences in 2017, and of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences in 2024.

program

Program

The program will be shared shortly.

Take a look at last edition's program

venue

Venue

ISWS is held in the University Residential Center located in the small medieval hilltop town of Bertinoro. This town is in Emilia Romagna about 50km east of Bologna at an elevation of 230m above sea level. It is easily reached by train and taxi from Bologna and is close to many splendid Italian locations such as Ravenna, Rimini on the Adriatic coast, and the Republic of San Marino (all within 35km) as well as some less well-known locations like the thermal springs of Fratta Terme, the Pieve di San Donato in Polenta and the castle and monastic gardens of Monte Maggio. Bertinoro can also be a base for visiting some of the better-known Italian locations such as Padua, Ferrara, Vicenza, Venice, Florence and Siena.

The city of Bertinoro itself is picturesque, with many narrow streets and walkways winding around the central peak. Meetings are held in an archiepiscopal castle that has been converted by the University of Bologna into a modern conference center with computing facilities and Internet access. From the castle you can enjoy a beautiful vista that stretches from the Tuscan Apennines to the Adriatic coast and the Alps over the Po Valley.

The University Residential Center is located at Via Frangipane, 6 in Bertinoro (Telephone: +39 0543 446500 Fax: +39 0543 446599). Bertinoro lies approximately half-way between Bologna and the Adriatic coast town of Rimini. If you are arriving by car, you can obtain driving instructions from most starting points using Google Maps.

Transportation

Bologna Airport to Bologna Centrale Railway Station

Shuttle Service

There’s a shuttle service every 11 minutes, the transfer takes around 20 minutes.
Tickets can be purchased directly online, from the automatic vending machines located in the airport, and in Bologna Centrale Railway Station (at the Aerobus departure point) or at the TPER ticket offices.

Taxi

The transfer takes ~15 minutes and the cost is ~20 €. From Bologna Centrale Railway station you can reach the school by train. You can choose between two target stations: Forlimpopoli/Bertinoro and Forlì.

Organized Shuttles

Two shuttles (at fixed times) will be organized from Bologna airport and bus station to the school, and one shuttle will bring you back from the school to the Forli train station, the last day. From Forli, you can take a train to Bologna airport or to Bologna main station.

Bologna Centrale to Forlimpopoli (Bertinoro)

Direct trains – shortest transfer to the school. If you arrive at Bologna Centrale Railway station at a time close to a train directed to Forlimpopoli/Bertinoro, we recommend to take that solution as the transfer is shorter. You can buy tickets online.

Bologna Centrale to Forli

Direct trains – longer transfer to the school. There are very frequent trains. You can see the available solutions and buy tickets online.

ISWS25 International Semantic Web Research Summer School

Knowledge graphs for reliable AI

​

Bertinoro, Italy

June 8 - 14, 2025

Application deadline: March 15th, 2025

Acceptance notification: April 1st, 2025

What is ISWS?

One week of intense research

June 8 - 14, 2025

Apply

Fees and Grants

Cancellation Policy

Student Background and Required Knowledge

Commitment and Social Activities

Directors

Local organization

Assistant tutors

Tutors

Keynotes

Program

The program will be shared shortly.

Venue

Transportation

Bologna Airport to Bologna Centrale Railway Station

Shuttle Service

Taxi

Organized Shuttles

Bologna Centrale to Forlimpopoli (Bertinoro)

Bologna Centrale to Forli

Sponsors

ISWS25
International Semantic Web Research Summer School