University of Milan-Bicocca has an open position for a Postdoctoral researcher in the context of the EU FP7 COMSODE Project (www.comsode.eu). The researcher will address research topics in the field of knowledge extraction and semantic matching methods for multi-lingual open data management.

 

Title of the position: “Knowledge extraction and information matching for profiling and linking multi-lingual open data sets.”

 

http://www.unimib.it/upload/pag/40854913/f1/f14a124english.pdf

 

 

Description:

 

COMSODE is an SME-driven RTD project aimed at progressing the capabilities in the field of Open Data re-use. Our concept is an answer to barriers still present in this young area: data published by various Open Data catalogues are poorly integrated; quality assessment and cleansing are seldom addressed. Costs of Open Data consumption are high and Open Data usage is still poor. COMSODE addresses these challenges by developing components for the quality assessment and improvement of open data, possibly published as linked open data.

 

The postdoctoral researcher will support the research team in the field of linked open data, for example by investigating methods for the semantic profiling of open data sets and the annotation and linking of the data schemas.

Data-driven methods for schema extraction from weakly structured sources (tabular data and RDF) and for the alignment of Linked Open schemas will be investigated in order to support the user of the COMSODE platform to (i) publish data profiles that express the content of the data (often available in CSV format), so as to make the data searchable from inside the COMSODE platform, (2) semantically annotate the schema and link the schema elements to existing data sets, so as to make the data interlinked inside and outside the COMSODE platform.

 

Research can leverage previous work carried out by the research team at Unimib, some of which in collaboration with other international research groups, in the field of ontology matching for linked open data, facet extraction, cross-language link discovery, and schema integration at large-scale.

 

The research will be carried out in a highly collaborative environment: the candidate is expected to collaborate with members of our team (faculty members, postdocs and PhD students), other COMSODE partners, and researchers of other institutions.  The candidate is expected to publish his/her results by co-authoring papers on topics such as schema annotation, data profile, and data linking in high-profile conferences and journals in the area of data management and semantic web. 

 

Required/desired qualifications:

 

Requirements for applying to the position are:

- A PhD in one of these fields: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems Management, Computational Linguistics, or related topics

- Good communication and writing skills in English

 

Other desired (but not mandatory) requested skills are

- Excellent programming skills

- Familiarity with Linked Data and Semantic Web languages (RDF, OWL2)

- Familiarity with probabilistic models or other matching methods 

- Python and shell scripting

- Previous experience with cloud infrastructure such as: Amazon EC2 and EBS, Heroku, etc.

 

Note that knowledge of Italian is NOT required for this position.

 

 

Salary, Start date and duration:

 

The salary is 32.600 euro  gross by year (approximate 2.000 euro net by month). The position will start on September 1, 2014 and is offered for a period of 1 year, with a possible extension subject to funding availability.

 

 

Location:

Milan is the main industrial, commercial and financial centre of Italy and a lively leading global city. University of Milan-Bicocca is a young but well-established university with a strong asset in research (it was ranked 21st in the on list of world's young universities by Times Higher Education). The research will be carried out at the ITIS Lab of the Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication, which is involved in several European and national projects and conduct theoretical and applied research in several fields such as Semantic Web, Information Systems and Service Science. UniMiB offers facilities for postdoctoral researchers

 

Applications:

 

As for every other equivalent position in Italy candidates have to apply to a public competition following the instructions available at http://www.unimib.it/upload/pag/40854913/f1/f14a124english.pdf . Please, notice that the application has to arrive at Unimib and registered before 7th July 2014.

 

 

Contact:

 

For any information bout this position please contact Andrea Maurino (maurino{at}disco.unimib.it) or Matteo Palmonari (palmonari{at}disco.unimib.it)