Dr HARITH ALANI
Knowledge Media institute
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
Office (direct): +44(0)1908 659399
h alani at open ac uk
Biography
Dr Harith Alani is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media Institute, where he is heading a group specialising in Social Semantics. Dr Alani is also a fellow of the Web Science Trust. Previously to joining KMi, Dr Alani was a senior research fellow at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. Dr Alani has published more than 70 articles in various top class journals and conferences, and has been involved as a principle investigator in several European and national research projects. Dr Alani is a frequent member of organisational committees of Semantic Web conferences. He is the Semantic Web In-Use track chair for ISWC 2011, and chair of the Sensor Web track for ESWC 2011. Dr Alani's research interests include social semantics, web science, ontology searching and ranking, semantic network analysis, eGovernment, offline-online social network tracking and analysis.
Position
Senior Lecturer at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University.
Visiting Research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.
Research Fellow at the Web Science Trust (WSRI).
Projects
WeGov (2010-2012)
EU project WeGov will develop a toolset so full advantage can be taken of well-established social networking sites when engaging citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policy-making processes. ROBUST (2010-2013)
The objective of ROBUST is to analyze, manage and care for online communities, in order to support their well being, to measure their created values and to exploit the knowledge and information contained within. This requires the development of metrics, models and algorithms in several fields.
Past Projects
TAGora (2006-2009)
This EU funded project helps to define Semiotic Dynamics, a new field that studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread and evolve over time in populations. It investigates web-scale collaborative tagging behaviour to further our understanding of the dynamics of information in online communities.
OntoMediate (2006-2009)
Aims to explore the extent to which collaborative environments can be used to support the identification of mappings between ontologies.
AKTivePSI: working with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) to demonstrate how such information can be semantically described and organised to increase integration and reuse.
ArtEquAKT: The Artequakt project implemented a system that searched the Web and extracted knowledge about artists using ontology guidance, automatically producing tailored biographies of artists.
BioOntoSearch: A three month project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to investigate searching and ranking of biomedical ontologies at the Stanford Medical Institute
AKT
The aim of AKT is to develop and extend a range of technologies to provide integrated methods and services for capturing, modeling, publishing, reusing and managing knowledge.
Publications
All my publications are available here in ePrints.
Conference Organisation
- Chair, ISWC In-Use Paper Track, Koblenz, Germany, 2011
- Chair, ESWC Sensor Web Track, Heraklion, Crete, 2011
- Posters/Demos chair, Future Internet Symposium (FIS), Berlin, Germany, 2010
- Semantic Web Technologies chair, Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Heraklion, Crete, 2010
- Poster/Demo chair, International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Washington DC, 2009
- Semantic Web Technologies chair, European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Heraklion, Crete, 2009
- Workshop chair, Workshop on Collaborative Construction, Management and Linking of Structured Knowledge (CK 2009), ISWC 2009, Washington DC, 2009
Program Committees
- International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2011
- Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), in Heraklion, Crete, 2011
- The 6th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap), in Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2011
- The 10th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), Crete, 2011
- The 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT), Eindhoven, 2011
- Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), at WWW Conference, Hyderabad, India, 2011
- International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), in Shanghai, China, 2010
- The 17th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW), in Lisbon, Portugal, 2010
- The 9th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), Crete, 2010