Michalis Mountantonakis (Department of Computer Science of the University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH)  is the winner of the 2020 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation: “Services for Connecting and Integrating Big Number of Linked Datasets” from  Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA).

This prize is awarded each year to the best Doctoral Thesis in the Semantic Web Research Area. SWSA is an international non-profit organization for promoting and exchanging scholarly work in Semantic Web and related fields throughout the world. The main SWSA activities include the supervision of the organization of the International Semantic Web Conference series (ISWC), which is the most prestigious and competitive conference in this research field, the organization and support of workshops, tutorials, or summer schools in the field of the Semantic Web, and fostering excellence in the field through a number of awards.

The doctoral dissertation of Michalis Mountantonakis belongs to the area of ​​Linked Data. He dealt with the problem of Linked Data Integration at large scale, which is a very big challenging problem. He factorized the integration process according to various dimensions, for better understanding the overall problem and for identifying the open challenges, and proposed novel indexes and algorithms for providing core services, which can be exploited for several tasks related to Data Integration, such as: for finding all the URIs of an entity, for finding all the available information for an entity, for discovering the most relevant datasets for a given  task, for dataset enrichment, for Question Answering, and many others.

The award will be officially presented to Mr. Michalis Mountantonakis during the opening ceremony (on Wednesday 4th November) of the 19th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), taking place on November 02-06 2020 in Athens, which will be a virtual conference due to COVID-19 measures.

Michalis Mountantonakis conducted his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Crete, and he is also a member of the Information Systems Laboratory of FORTH, since 2013. The advisor of his PhD dissertation was Yannis Tzitzikas, Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at University of Crete and Affiliated Researcher of FORTH.