On 30 October Michiel Hildebrand (CWI) received the Best Student Paper Award for research proposals at the International Semantic Web Conference 2008 in Karlsruhe.

The computer scientist received the award for his proposal on intelligent web interfaces: Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Collections. The contest had 36 participants, and seven of them got the opportunity to defend their proposal. The conference is the most important event for the Semantic Web, counting more than 600 participants from all major institutes.

PhD student Hildebrand investigated how to support end users in exploring Linked Data on the web. On the present World Wide Web documents refer to each other through hyperlinks. The web basically looks like one large document server. In future the web will become more like a database, with small pieces of interrelated information, such as people, pictures and other data. These Linked Data can be utilized much more efficiently.

 In a project with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Michiel Hildebrand and his supervisor Jacco van Ossenbruggen developed a prototype interface, enabling art experts to efficiently use web data to create structured descriptions of works of art. Future research will focus on the use of structured descriptions and links to more background information, to better support different types of search tasks.

More information:
- Semantic Media Interfaces research group
- MultimediaN/E-Culture project
- the research proposal