Research

Reseacher Interests

My research interests are focused on:

  • Big Data, Data Science, Data Linking;

  • Linked (open) data, Linked Data Profiling, Visual Querying, Visualization & Summarization of Big Linked Data, Exploratorary Search;

  • Visual Analytics, Information Visualization, Data representations;

  • Database systems, Web and information systems, Data Integration, Semantic Interoperability;

  • Knowledge and Ontology Design, Semantic Technologies, Metadata Extraction, Data source annotation, Word Sense Disambiguation, Topic Detection, Natural language processing applied to structured and semi-structured data sources;

  • Open Data, Open Government and Smart Cities.

I have worked as reviewer for several international journals in the field of information and knowledge management, I have been a member of the scientific program committee of the several International Conferences.

I am a member of the editorial advisory board for the book "Big Data Governance and Perspectives in Knowledge Management" IGI Global (www.igi-global.com).

I am on of the Guest Editors for the Special Issue "Smart Data and Semantics in a Sensor World" Applied Sciences (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci).

Prizes

I win the first prize for the Best Doctoral Research Proposal Symposium at Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB) International Conference, London, 2008.

I received the award (third place) for the Keystone Data Hackathon Challenge, at the University of Malta, as part of the 1st KEYSTONE Training School Keyword Search over Big Data organized within the COST Action IC 1302 project.

Software Tools

I partecipate in the co-develop of several software tools: “H-BOLD” a tool proposing high level visualizations on Big Open Linked Data (2018, still under development), “LODeX” a tool for browsing and visual querying Linked Data (2014-2016), "ALA: Dealing with Uncertainty in Lexical Annotation" a semi-automatic annotation tool (2008-2011), and the open source version of the data integration system "MOMIS"(2011).

Spin Off

I am one of the founders and a member of the Scientific Committee of DataRiver srl. DataRiver was founded on 2009 in Modena (ITALY) as a spin-off of University of Modena and Reggio Emilia by database research group DBGroup to support the data integration Open Source System MOMIS. DataRiver offers cutting-edge software solutions in Data Integration, Clinical Data Management, Semantic Web, Information Management, Business e Location Intelligence for:

  • Integration of company information systems with external data sources (relational databases, semi-structured data sources, BigData and OpenData)

  • Clinical data processing and Clinical Trial Management

  • Business and Location Intelligence

  • Sensor network querying and data collection aimed at Energy monitoring

DataRiver is accredited as a Qualified Organization for Research and Innovation by the Emilia-Romagna High Technology Network and won several awards and funding at the local, regional and national.

Participation in Program Committee - Advisory Group

2016- present Member of the scientific program committee of the International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR-Short) http://sigir.org/sigir2017/

2017- present Member of the scientific program committee of the International Symposium Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (AAIA) https://fedcsis.org/2017/aaia

2017- present Member of the Sii-mobility Advisory Group, the Sii-Mobility is a national Smart City project for transportation and land mobility, it supports integrated interoperability services for citizens and public administrations. www.sii-mobility.org/

2016- present Member of the scientific committee of the Mobile App Development mini-track program held at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) http://hicss.hawaii.edu/

2015, 2017 Member of the scientific program committee of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD) http://www.keod.ic3k.org/

2016 Organizer of the "Open Data Day" day of scientific diffusion held in Modena 5 March 2016 and sponsored by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia as part of the International Open Data Day initiative www.dbgroup.unimore.it/opendataday