The paper entitled “A Flexible Framework for Understanding the Dynamics of Evolving RDF Datasets”, presented by Yannis Roussakis, received the Best Student Research Paper Award at the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania October 11-15, 2015).

This paper proposes a novel framework that enables identifying, analyzing and understanding the dynamics of Web data. This would allow remote users of a dataset to identify changes, even if they have no access to the actual change process. The followed approach is flexible enough to capture the peculiarities and needs of different applications on dynamic data, while being formally robust due to the satisfaction of the completeness and unambiguity properties. In addition, this framework allows the persistent representation of the detected changes between versions, in a manner that enables easy and efficient navigation among versions, automated processing and analysis of changes, cross-snapshot queries (spanning across different versions), as well as queries involving both changes and data.This work is evaluated using real Linked Open Data, and exhibits good scalability properties.

The paper's authors are the following members of the Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH): Yannis Roussakis, Ioannis Chrysakis, Kostas Stefanidis, Giorgos Flouris, and Yannis Stavrakas from the Institute for the Management of Information Systems of the ATHENA Research Center.