Web Information Systems

The Software Technology department at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) started with the appointment of prof.dr.ir. Geert-Jan Houben a new group on Web Information Systems (WIS) that is involved in the education in Computer Science and Information Architecture and that concentrates in its research on the engineering and science of the web, specifically on the engineering of web-based information systems with semantics-based user-adaptation.
Main topics in the group's research activities concern

• Web data and semantics - managing, integrating and linking data in web-based information systems
• Web analysis and user modeling - understanding usage and users in web-based information systems
• Web engineering and adaptation - engineering and adapting web-based information systems

Further details on the research activities that the WIS team is doing are listed at Research Lines. 

Trending research activities: ImREAL, WUDE, RDFGears, Twitcident, GeniUS and Twinder.

Follow us on Twitter: @wisdelft

WIS activities & news

Papers accepted at WWW, Hypertext, ECIR, UMAP, WebSci, ICWE, ...

Great news: several papers have been accepted in the first months of 2012. Our research on user modeling in the Social Web, and culture-related differences, has been accepted at UMAP and WebScience. Twitcident-related work about automatic filtering of Social Web streams will be presented at WWW and Hypertext. Studies on geographical user profiling and serendipitous browsing will be presented at ECIR. Work on Twinder and social event detection will be presented at ICWE.

Upcoming WIS Events

We are co-organizing workshops on user modeling and web engineering: AUM @ UMAP 2012 is about augmented user modeling and ComposableWeb @ ICWE 2012 is about lightweight integration on the Web. We are also organizing SWEET  @ SIGMOD 2012 on scalable workflow engines and cloud computing. On May 11 we organize the CATCH day on Cultural Heritage Getting Social: Trust and Authority in the Crowd.

Three New Projects: PoliMedia, WUDE and Twitcident

The PoliMedia project on Linked Open Politics has just started May 2012. The WUDE project on Web User Demand Elicitation has been awarded and has started at the end of 2011. Twitcident focuses on real-time analytics and delivery of relevant tweets during large incidents and emergencies.

Best Paper at UMAP2011

"Analyzing User Modeling on Twitter for Personalized News Recommendations" by Fabian Abel, Qi Gao, Geert-Jan Houben and Ke Tao (all from WIS) won the Best Paper award at UMAP, the premier international conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, this year in Spain. At http://wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/umap2011/ you find relevant material about that paper.

Positions and vacancies

At TU Delft, the WIS group is always interested in good candidates at the level of Postdoc or PhD- or Junior-researcher, of course dependent on the availability of funding. In general, important topics of research will be methods, techniques and tools for designing and developing Web-based information systems, with a focus on adaptation and personalization, semantic search and semantic integration. The applicant's specific areas of interest might include, but are not limited to, technical aspects of the (Semantic) Web, Web engineering, semantic search and retrieval, linked data, semi-structured data and data integration, distribution and interoperability. Candidates interested to work in the group, have a look at the page for Vacancies.

At this moment we are reviewing candidates for a position as an Assistant / Associate professor in Web Information Systems.