Colloquium d’Informatique de Sorbonne Université
Serge Abiteboul, Inria

Tuesday, February 24, 2015 18:00
Amphi 15 Sorbonne University - Faculté des Sciences

Toward personal knowledge bases

Serge Abiteboul obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and a State Doctoral Thesis from the University of Paris-Sud. He has been a researcher at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique since 1982 and is now Distinguished Affiliated Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He was a Lecturer at the École Polytechnique and Visiting Professor at Stanford and Oxford University. He has been Chair Professor at Collège de France in 2011-12 and Francqui Chair Professor at Namur University in 2012-2013. He co-founded the company Xyleme in 2000. Serge Abiteboul has received the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award in 1998, the EADS Award from the French Academy of sciences in 2007; the Milner Award from the Royal Society in 2013; and a European Research Council Fellowship (2008-2013). He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2008, and a member the Academy of Europe in 2011. He is a member of the Conseil national du numérique and Chairman of the Scientific board of the Société d'Informatique de France. His research work focuses mainly on data, information and knowledge management, particularly on the Web. He founded and is an editor of the blog binaire.blogs.lemonde.fr..

Abstract

A Web user today has his/her data and information distributed in a number of services that operate in silos. Computer wizards already know how to control their personal data to some extent. It is now becoming possible for everyone to do the same, and there are many advantages to doing so. Everyone should now be in a position to manage his/her personal information. Furthermore, we will argue that we should move towards personal knowledge bases and discuss advantages to do so. We will mention recent works around a datalog dialect, namely Webdamlog.