Elena Demidova

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Tabular data plays an essential role in many data analytics and machine learning tasks. Typically, tabular data does not possess any machine-readable semantics. In this context, semantic table interpretation is crucial for making data analytics workflows more robust and explainable. This article proposes Tab2KG - a novel method that targets at the interpretation of tables with previously unseen data and automatically infers their semantics to transform them into semantic data graphs. We introduce original lightweight semantic profiles that enrich a domain ontology's concepts and relations and represent domain and table characteristics. We propose a one-shot learning approach that relies on these profiles to map a tabular dataset containing previously unseen instances to a domain ontology. In contrast to the existing semantic table interpretation approaches, Tab2KG relies on the semantic profiles only and does not require any instance lookup. This property makes Tab2KG particularly suitable in the data analytics context, in which data tables typically contain new instances. Our experimental evaluation on several real-world datasets from different application domains demonstrates that Tab2KG outperforms state-of-the-art semantic table interpretation baselines.

Elena Demidova, Alishiba Dsouza, Simon Gottschalk et al.

Geographic data plays an essential role in various Web, Semantic Web and machine learning applications. OpenStreetMap and knowledge graphs are critical complementary sources of geographic data on the Web. However, data veracity, the lack of integration of geographic and semantic characteristics, and incomplete representations substantially limit the data utility. Verification, enrichment and semantic representation are essential for making geographic data accessible for the Semantic Web and machine learning. This article describes recent approaches we developed to tackle these challenges.

Tin Kuculo, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Quotes of public figures can mark turning points in history. A quote can explain its originator's actions, foreshadowing political or personal decisions and revealing character traits. Impactful quotes cross language barriers and influence the general population's reaction to specific stances, always facing the risk of being misattributed or taken out of context. The provision of a cross-lingual knowledge graph of quotes that establishes the authenticity of quotes and their contexts is of great importance to allow the exploration of the lives of important people as well as topics from the perspective of what was actually said. In this paper, we present QuoteKG, the first multilingual knowledge graph of quotes. We propose the QuoteKG creation pipeline that extracts quotes from Wikiquote, a free and collaboratively created collection of quotes in many languages, and aligns different mentions of the same quote. QuoteKG includes nearly one million quotes in $55$ languages, said by more than $69,000$ people of public interest across a wide range of topics. QuoteKG is publicly available and can be accessed via a SPARQL endpoint.

Leonie von Wahl, Nicolas Tempelmeier, Ashutosh Sao et al.

The transition from conventional mobility to electromobility largely depends on charging infrastructure availability and optimal placement.This paper examines the optimal placement of charging stations in urban areas. We maximise the charging infrastructure supply over the area and minimise waiting, travel, and charging times while setting budget constraints. Moreover, we include the possibility of charging vehicles at home to obtain a more refined estimation of the actual charging demand throughout the urban area. We formulate the Placement of Charging Stations problem as a non-linear integer optimisation problem that seeks the optimal positions for charging stations and the optimal number of charging piles of different charging types. We design a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to solve the charging station placement problem (PCRL). Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show how the PCRL reduces the waiting and travel time while increasing the benefit of the charging plan compared to five baselines. Compared to the existing infrastructure, we can reduce the waiting time by up to 97% and increase the benefit up to 497%.

Sara Abdollahi, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

While societal events often impact people worldwide, a significant fraction of events has a local focus that primarily affects specific language communities. Examples include national elections, the development of the Coronavirus pandemic in different countries, and local film festivals such as the César Awards in France and the Moscow International Film Festival in Russia. However, existing entity recommendation approaches do not sufficiently address the language context of recommendation. This article introduces the novel task of language-specific event recommendation, which aims to recommend events relevant to the user query in the language-specific context. This task can support essential information retrieval activities, including web navigation and exploratory search, considering the language context of user information needs. We propose LaSER, a novel approach toward language-specific event recommendation. LaSER blends the language-specific latent representations (embeddings) of entities and events and spatio-temporal event features in a learning to rank model. This model is trained on publicly available Wikipedia Clickstream data. The results of our user study demonstrate that LaSER outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation baselines by up to 33 percentage points in MAP@5 concerning the language-specific relevance of recommended events.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova

OpenStreetMap is a unique source of openly available worldwide map data, increasingly adopted in real-world applications. Vandalism detection in OpenStreetMap is critical and remarkably challenging due to the large scale of the dataset, the sheer number of contributors, various vandalism forms, and the lack of annotated data to train machine learning algorithms. This paper presents Ovid - a novel machine learning method for vandalism detection in OpenStreetMap. Ovid relies on a neural network architecture that adopts a multi-head attention mechanism to effectively summarize information indicating vandalism from OpenStreetMap changesets. To facilitate automated vandalism detection, we introduce a set of original features that capture changeset, user, and edit information. Our evaluation results on real-world vandalism data demonstrate that the proposed Ovid method outperforms the baselines by 4.7 percentage points in F1 score.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova

OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative, crowdsourced Web map, is a unique source of openly available worldwide map data, increasingly adopted in Web applications. Vandalism detection is a critical task to support trust and maintain OSM transparency. This task is remarkably challenging due to the large scale of the dataset, the sheer number of contributors, various vandalism forms, and the lack of annotated data. This paper presents Ovid - a novel attention-based method for vandalism detection in OSM. Ovid relies on a novel neural architecture that adopts a multi-head attention mechanism to summarize information indicating vandalism from OSM changesets effectively. To facilitate automated vandalism detection, we introduce a set of original features that capture changeset, user, and edit information. Furthermore, we extract a dataset of real-world vandalism incidents from the OSM edit history for the first time and provide this dataset as open data. Our evaluation conducted on real-world vandalism data demonstrates the effectiveness of Ovid.

Alishiba Dsouza, Nicolas Tempelmeier, Ran Yu et al.

OpenStreetMap is a rich source of openly available geographic information. However, the representation of geographic entities, e.g., buildings, mountains, and cities, within OpenStreetMap is highly heterogeneous, diverse, and incomplete. As a result, this rich data source is hardly usable for real-world applications. This paper presents WorldKG -- a new geographic knowledge graph aiming to provide a comprehensive semantic representation of geographic entities in OpenStreetMap. We describe the WorldKG knowledge graph, including its ontology that builds the semantic dataset backbone, the extraction procedure of the ontology and geographic entities from OpenStreetMap, and the methods to enhance entity annotation. We perform statistical and qualitative dataset assessment, demonstrating the large scale and high precision of the semantic geographic information in WorldKG.

Shahid Latif, Shivam Agarwal, Simon Gottschalk et al.

Knowledge graphs store information about historical figures and their relationships indirectly through shared events. We developed a visualization system, VisKonnect, for analyzing the intertwined lives of historical figures based on the events they participated in. A user's query is parsed for identifying named entities, and related data is retrieved from an event knowledge graph. While a short textual answer to the query is generated using the GPT-3 language model, various linked visualizations provide context, display additional information related to the query, and allow exploration.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is currently the richest publicly available information source on geographic entities (e.g., buildings and roads) worldwide. However, using OSM entities in machine learning models and other applications is challenging due to the large scale of OSM, the extreme heterogeneity of entity annotations, and a lack of a well-defined ontology to describe entity semantics and properties. This paper presents GeoVectors - a unique, comprehensive world-scale linked open corpus of OSM entity embeddings covering the entire OSM dataset and providing latent representations of over 980 million geographic entities in 180 countries. The GeoVectors corpus captures semantic and geographic dimensions of OSM entities and makes these entities directly accessible to machine learning algorithms and semantic applications. We create a semantic description of the GeoVectors corpus, including identity links to the Wikidata and DBpedia knowledge graphs to supply context information. Furthermore, we provide a SPARQL endpoint - a semantic interface that offers direct access to the semantic and latent representations of geographic entities in OSM.

Ashutosh Sao, Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova

With an increasing number of electric vehicles, the accurate forecasting of charging station occupation is crucial to enable reliable vehicle charging. This paper introduces a novel Deep Fusion of Dynamic and Static Information model (DFDS) to effectively forecast the charging station occupation. We exploit static information, such as the mean occupation concerning the time of day, to learn the specific charging station patterns. We supplement such static data with dynamic information reflecting the preceding charging station occupation and temporal information such as daytime and weekday. Our model efficiently fuses dynamic and static information to facilitate accurate forecasting. We evaluate the proposed model on a real-world dataset containing 593 charging stations in Germany, covering August 2020 to December 2020. Our experiments demonstrate that DFDS outperforms the baselines by 3.45 percent points in F1-score on average.

Rajjat Dadwal, Thorben Funke, Elena Demidova

Traffic accident prediction is a crucial task in the mobility domain. State-of-the-art accident prediction approaches are based on static and uniform grid-based geospatial aggregations, limiting their capability for fine-grained predictions. This property becomes particularly problematic in more complex regions such as city centers. In such regions, a grid cell can contain subregions with different properties; furthermore, an actual accident-prone region can be split across grid cells arbitrarily. This paper proposes Adaptive Clustering Accident Prediction (ACAP) - a novel accident prediction method based on a grid growing algorithm. ACAP applies adaptive clustering to the observed geospatial accident distribution and performs embeddings of temporal, accident-related, and regional features to increase prediction accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ACAP method using open real-world accident datasets from three cities in Germany. We demonstrate that ACAP improves the accident prediction performance for complex regions by 2-3 percent points in F1-score by adapting the geospatial aggregation to the distribution of the underlying spatio-temporal events. Our grid growing approach outperforms the clustering-based baselines by four percent points in terms of F1-score on average.

Alishiba Dsouza, Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the richest openly available sources of volunteered geographic information. Although OSM includes various geographical entities, their descriptions are highly heterogeneous, incomplete, and do not follow any well-defined ontology. Knowledge graphs can potentially provide valuable semantic information to enrich OSM entities. However, interlinking OSM entities with knowledge graphs is inherently difficult due to the large, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and flat OSM schema and the annotation sparsity. This paper tackles the alignment of OSM tags with the corresponding knowledge graph classes holistically by jointly considering the schema and instance layers. We propose a novel neural architecture that capitalizes upon a shared latent space for tag-to-class alignment created using linked entities in OSM and knowledge graphs. Our experiments performed to align OSM datasets for several countries with two of the most prominent openly available knowledge graphs, namely, Wikidata and DBpedia, demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art schema alignment baselines by up to 53 percentage points in terms of F1-score. The resulting alignment facilitates new semantic annotations for over 10 million OSM entities worldwide, which is more than a 400% increase compared to the existing semantic annotations in OSM.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Udo Feuerhake, Oskar Wage et al.

The discovery of spatio-temporal dependencies within urban road networks that cause Recurrent Congestion (RC) patterns is crucial for numerous real-world applications, including urban planning and scheduling of public transportation services. While most existing studies investigate temporal patterns of RC phenomena, the influence of the road network topology on RC is often overlooked. This article proposes the ST-Discovery algorithm, a novel unsupervised spatio-temporal data mining algorithm that facilitates the effective data-driven discovery of RC dependencies induced by the road network topology using real-world traffic data. We factor out regularly reoccurring traffic phenomena, such as rush hours, mainly induced by the daytime, by modelling and systematically exploiting temporal traffic load outliers. We present an algorithm that first constructs connected subgraphs of the road network based on the traffic speed outliers. Second, the algorithm identifies pairs of subgraphs that indicate spatio-temporal correlations in their traffic load behaviour to identify topological dependencies within the road network. Finally, we rank the identified subgraph pairs based on the dependency score determined by our algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that ST-Discovery can effectively reveal topological dependencies in urban road networks.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Research on notable accomplishments and important events in the life of people of public interest usually requires close reading of long encyclopedic or biographical sources, which is a tedious and time-consuming task. Whereas semantic reference sources, such as the EventKG knowledge graph, provide structured representations of relevant facts, they often include hundreds of events and temporal relations for particular entities. In this paper, we present EventKG+BT - a timeline generation system that creates concise and interactive spatio-temporal representations of biographies from a knowledge graph using distant supervision.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova

Representations of geographic entities captured in popular knowledge graphs such as Wikidata and DBpedia are often incomplete. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a rich source of openly available, volunteered geographic information that has a high potential to complement these representations. However, identity links between the knowledge graph entities and OSM nodes are still rare. The problem of link discovery in these settings is particularly challenging due to the lack of a strict schema and heterogeneity of the user-defined node representations in OSM. In this article, we propose OSM2KG - a novel link discovery approach to predict identity links between OSM nodes and geographic entities in a knowledge graph. The core of the OSM2KG approach is a novel latent, compact representation of OSM nodes that captures semantic node similarity in an embedding. OSM2KG adopts this latent representation to train a supervised model for link prediction and utilises existing links between OSM and knowledge graphs for training. Our experiments conducted on several OSM datasets, as well as the Wikidata and DBpedia knowledge graphs, demonstrate that OSM2KG can reliably discover identity links. OSM2KG achieves an F1 score of 92.05% on Wikidata and of 94.17% on DBpedia on average, which corresponds to a 21.82 percentage points increase in F1 score on Wikidata compared to the best performing baselines.

Sara Abdollahi, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

An increasing need to analyse event-centric cross-lingual information calls for innovative user interaction models that assist users in crossing the language barrier. However, datasets that reflect user interaction traces in cross-lingual settings required to train and evaluate the user interaction models are mostly missing. In this paper, we present the EventKG+Click dataset that aims to facilitate the creation and evaluation of such interaction models. EventKG+Click builds upon the event-centric EventKG knowledge graph and language-specific information on user interactions with events, entities, and their relations derived from the Wikipedia clickstream.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Anzumana Sander, Udo Feuerhake et al.

In recent years, a large number of research efforts aimed at the development of machine learning models to predict complex spatial-temporal mobility patterns and their impact on road traffic and infrastructure. However, the utility of these models is often diminished due to the lack of accessible user interfaces to view and analyse prediction results. In this paper, we present the Traffic Analytics Dashboard ( TA-Dash), an interactive dashboard that enables the visualisation of complex spatial-temporal urban traffic patterns. We demonstrate the utility of TA-Dash at the example of two recently proposed spatial-temporal models for urban traffic and urban road infrastructure analysis. In particular, the use cases include the analysis, prediction and visualisation of the impact of planned special events on urban road traffic as well as the analysis and visualisation of structural dependencies within urban road networks. The lightweight TA-Dash dashboard aims to address non-expert users involved in urban traffic management and mobility service planning. The TA-Dash builds on a flexible layer-based architecture that is easily adaptable to the visualisation of new models.

Hamid Zafar, Mohnish Dubey, Jens Lehmann et al.

Semantic Question Answering (SQA) systems automatically interpret user questions expressed in a natural language in terms of semantic queries. This process involves uncertainty, such that the resulting queries do not always accurately match the user intent, especially for more complex and less common questions. In this article, we aim to empower users in guiding SQA systems towards the intended semantic queries through interaction. We introduce IQA - an interaction scheme for SQA pipelines. This scheme facilitates seamless integration of user feedback in the question answering process and relies on Option Gain - a novel metric that enables efficient and intuitive user interaction. Our evaluation shows that using the proposed scheme, even a small number of user interactions can lead to significant improvements in the performance of SQA systems.

Tarcísio Souza Costa, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Semantic Question Answering (QA) is a crucial technology to facilitate intuitive user access to semantic information stored in knowledge graphs. Whereas most of the existing QA systems and datasets focus on entity-centric questions, very little is known about these systems' performance in the context of events. As new event-centric knowledge graphs emerge, datasets for such questions gain importance. In this paper, we present the Event-QA dataset for answering event-centric questions over knowledge graphs. Event-QA contains 1000 semantic queries and the corresponding English, German and Portuguese verbalizations for EventKG - an event-centric knowledge graph with more than 970 thousand events.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Event series, such as the Wimbledon Championships and the US presidential elections, represent important happenings in key societal areas including sports, culture and politics. However, semantic reference sources, such as Wikidata, DBpedia and EventKG knowledge graphs, provide only an incomplete event series representation. In this paper we target the problem of event series completion in a knowledge graph. We address two tasks: 1) prediction of sub-event relations, and 2) inference of real-world events that happened as a part of event series and are missing in the knowledge graph. To address these problems, our proposed supervised HapPenIng approach leverages structural features of event series. HapPenIng does not require any external knowledge - the characteristics making it unique in the context of event inference. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that HapPenIng outperforms the baselines by 44 and 52 percentage points in terms of precision for the sub-event prediction and the inference tasks, correspondingly.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

One of the key requirements to facilitate the semantic analytics of information regarding contemporary and historical events on the Web, in the news and in social media is the availability of reference knowledge repositories containing comprehensive representations of events, entities and temporal relations. Existing knowledge graphs, with popular examples including DBpedia, YAGO and Wikidata, focus mostly on entity-centric information and are insufficient in terms of their coverage and completeness with respect to events and temporal relations. In this article we address this limitation, formalise the concept of a temporal knowledge graph and present its instantiation - EventKG. EventKG is a multilingual event-centric temporal knowledge graph that incorporates over 690 thousand events and over 2.3 million temporal relations obtained from several large-scale knowledge graphs and semi-structured sources and makes them available through a canonical RDF representation. Whereas popular entities often possess hundreds of relations within a temporal knowledge graph such as EventKG, generating a concise overview of the most important temporal relations for a given entity is a challenging task. In this article we demonstrate an application of EventKG to biographical timeline generation, where we adopt a distant supervision method to identify relations most relevant for an entity biography. Our evaluation results provide insights on the characteristics of EventKG and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed biographical timeline generation method.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

In this article we address the problem of text passage alignment across interlingual article pairs in Wikipedia. We develop methods that enable the identification and interlinking of text passages written in different languages and containing overlapping information. Interlingual text passage alignment can enable Wikipedia editors and readers to better understand language-specific context of entities, provide valuable insights in cultural differences and build a basis for qualitative analysis of the articles. An important challenge in this context is the trade-off between the granularity of the extracted text passages and the precision of the alignment. Whereas short text passages can result in more precise alignment, longer text passages can facilitate a better overview of the differences in an article pair. To better understand these aspects from the user perspective, we conduct a user study at the example of the German, Russian and the English Wikipedia and collect a user-annotated benchmark. Then we propose MultiWiki -- a method that adopts an integrated approach to the text passage alignment using semantic similarity measures and greedy algorithms and achieves precise results with respect to the user-defined alignment. MultiWiki demonstration is publicly available and currently supports four language pairs.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

The provision of multilingual event-centric temporal knowledge graphs such as EventKG enables structured access to representations of a large number of historical and contemporary events in a variety of language contexts. Timelines provide an intuitive way to facilitate an overview of events related to a query entity - i.e., an entity or an event of user interest - over a certain period of time. In this paper, we present EventKG+TL - a novel system that generates cross-lingual event timelines using EventKG and facilitates an overview of the language-specific event relevance and popularity along with the cross-lingual differences.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

One of the key requirements to facilitate semantic analytics of information regarding contemporary and historical events on the Web, in the news and in social media is the availability of reference knowledge repositories containing comprehensive representations of events and temporal relations. Existing knowledge graphs, with popular examples including DBpedia, YAGO and Wikidata, focus mostly on entity-centric information and are insufficient in terms of their coverage and completeness with respect to events and temporal relations. EventKG presented in this paper is a multilingual event-centric temporal knowledge graph that addresses this gap. EventKG incorporates over 690 thousand contemporary and historical events and over 2.3 million temporal relations extracted from several large-scale knowledge graphs and semi-structured sources and makes them available through a canonical representation.

Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova, Stefan Dietze

Embedded markup of Web pages has seen widespread adoption throughout the past years driven by standards such as RDFa and Microdata and initiatives such as schema.org, where recent studies show an adoption by 39% of all Web pages already in 2016. While this constitutes an important information source for tasks such as Web search, Web page classification or knowledge graph augmentation, individual markup nodes are usually sparsely described and often lack essential information. For instance, from 26 million nodes describing events within the Common Crawl in 2016, 59% of nodes provide less than six statements and only 257,000 nodes (0.96%) are typed with more specific event subtypes. Nevertheless, given the scale and diversity of Web markup data, nodes that provide missing information can be obtained from the Web in large quantities, in particular for categorical properties. Such data constitutes potential training data for inferring missing information to significantly augment sparsely described nodes. In this work, we introduce a supervised approach for inferring missing categorical properties in Web markup. Our experiments, conducted on properties of events and movies, show a performance of 79% and 83% F1 score correspondingly, significantly outperforming existing baselines.

Hady Elsahar, Elena Demidova, Simon Gottschalk et al.

We explore methods to extract relations between named entities from free text in an unsupervised setting. In addition to standard feature extraction, we develop a novel method to re-weight word embeddings. We alleviate the problem of features sparsity using an individual feature reduction. Our approach exhibits a significant improvement by 5.8% over the state-of-the-art relation clustering scoring a F1-score of 0.416 on the NYT-FB dataset.

Gerhard Gossen, Elena Demidova, Thomas Risse

Web archives are typically very broad in scope and extremely large in scale. This makes data analysis appear daunting, especially for non-computer scientists. These collections constitute an increasingly important source for researchers in the social sciences, the historical sciences and journalists interested in studying past events. However, there are currently no access methods that help users to efficiently access information, in particular about specific events, beyond the retrieval of individual disconnected documents. Therefore we propose a novel method to extract event-centric document collections from large scale Web archives. This method relies on a specialized focused extraction algorithm. Our experiments on the German Web archive (covering a time period of 19 years) demonstrate that our method enables the extraction of event-centric collections for different event types.

Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova

Wikipedia articles representing an entity or a topic in different language editions evolve independently within the scope of the language-specific user communities. This can lead to different points of views reflected in the articles, as well as complementary and inconsistent information. An analysis of how the information is propagated across the Wikipedia language editions can provide important insights in the article evolution along the temporal and cultural dimensions and support quality control. To facilitate such analysis, we present MultiWiki - a novel web-based user interface that provides an overview of the similarities and differences across the article pairs originating from different language editions on a timeline. MultiWiki enables users to observe the changes in the interlingual article similarity over time and to perform a detailed visual comparison of the article snapshots at a particular time point.

Tarcisio Souza, Elena Demidova, Thomas Risse et al.

Long-term Web archives comprise Web documents gathered over longer time periods and can easily reach hundreds of terabytes in size. Semantic annotations such as named entities can facilitate intelligent access to the Web archive data. However, the annotation of the entire archive content on this scale is often infeasible. The most efficient way to access the documents within Web archives is provided through their URLs, which are typically stored in dedicated index files.The URLs of the archived Web documents can contain semantic information and can offer an efficient way to obtain initial semantic annotations for the archived documents. In this paper, we analyse the applicability of semantic analysis techniques such as named entity extraction to the URLs in a Web archive. We evaluate the precision of the named entity extraction from the URLs in the Popular German Web dataset and analyse the proportion of the archived URLs from 1,444 popular domains in the time interval from 2000 to 2012 to which these techniques are applicable. Our results demonstrate that named entity recognition can be successfully applied to a large number of URLs in our Web archive and provide a good starting point to efficiently annotate large scale collections of Web documents.

Gerhard Gossen, Elena Demidova, Thomas Risse

Researchers in the Digital Humanities and journalists need to monitor, collect and analyze fresh online content regarding current events such as the Ebola outbreak or the Ukraine crisis on demand. However, existing focused crawling approaches only consider topical aspects while ignoring temporal aspects and therefore cannot achieve thematically coherent and fresh Web collections. Especially Social Media provide a rich source of fresh content, which is not used by state-of-the-art focused crawlers. In this paper we address the issues of enabling the collection of fresh and relevant Web and Social Web content for a topic of interest through seamless integration of Web and Social Media in a novel integrated focused crawler. The crawler collects Web and Social Media content in a single system and exploits the stream of fresh Social Media content for guiding the crawler.

Gerhard Gossen, Elena Demidova, Thomas Risse

Collections of Web documents about specific topics are needed for many areas of current research. Focused crawling enables the creation of such collections on demand. Current focused crawlers require the user to manually specify starting points for the crawl (seed URLs). These are also used to describe the expected topic of the collection. The choice of seed URLs influences the quality of the resulting collection and requires a lot of expertise. In this demonstration we present the iCrawl Wizard, a tool that assists users in defining focused crawls efficiently and semi-automatically. Our tool uses major search engines and Social Media APIs as well as information extraction techniques to find seed URLs and a semantic description of the crawl intent. Using the iCrawl Wizard even non-expert users can create semantic specifications for focused crawlers interactively and efficiently.

Gerhard Gossen, Elena Demidova, Thomas Risse

Web archives capture the history of the Web and are therefore an important source to study how societal developments have been reflected on the Web. However, the large size of Web archives and their temporal nature pose many challenges to researchers interested in working with these collections. In this work, we describe the challenges of working with Web archives and propose the research methodology of extracting and studying sub-collections of the archive focused on specific topics and events. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of this approach and suggest a framework for creating sub-collections.