XR: a Standard-Compliant Framework for Fact-Checking the Web

by Ioana Manolescu, Inria Saclay

April 30th 2013 @ 11:00, in Ofek

In this invited talk Ioana Manolescu will present her work about

XR: a Standard-Compliant Framework for Fact-Checking the Web

Abstract:

We consider a form of collaborative analysis of Web data, which can be loosely defined as "fact-checking the Web", by reference to the many electronic tools and platforms for analyzing, confirming or proving false, claims made by various public figures in recent elections in France and the US. Such claims are transcribed in Web pages, social media etc., commented, dissected and analyzed, separating truths from half-truths and outright lies. This analysis typically involves users from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints, increasing the likelihood that independent opinions are gathered, and users back their statements with references to online content which stands as evidence. It can be argued that such an informed Web of open, evidence-backed facts is a necessary ingredient of modern democracies, since popular choice such as exercised by voting is not very meaningful if it is not backed by background knowledge. The talk presents XR, a W3C standard-compliant framework developed within our group to support collaborative analysis and enrichment of structured documents (XML) with annotations (RDF). We describe the XR data model and query language, the architecture of a recently developed XR query evaluation engine, and how XR can be harnessed to support collaborative fact-checking on data and knowledge gathered from the Web. XR relies on open and free standards, making it possible to integrate and enrich data and information from a variety of sources. The XR project is joint work with François Goasdoué, Julien Leblay, Stamatis Zampetakis, Yannis Katsis and Alin Deutsch. More information can be found at:

Speaker:

Ioana Manolescu is Senior Inria researcher (DR2) Lead of the Inria/U. Paris Sud OAK project, focused on database optimizations and architectures for complex large data.

She is Member of the IEEE TCDE awards committee, Coordinator of the "Scalable, secure techniques for large-scale data management" task within DigiCosme LabEx (IT network of excellency in the Saclay area), Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Member of the editorial board of the Springer "Data-Centric Systems and Applications" book series.