Information Service Engineering

Information Service Engineering (ISE) focuses on researching, developing, and refining symbolic knowledge representations, sub-symbolic AI technologies, and their hybrid integration. Our goal is to advance state-of-the-art methodologies by exploring their applications in real-world contexts. A core focus is the interplay between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, investigating how knowledge graphs and ontologies can enhance deep learning and language models, and vice versa. ISE conducts applied research in semantic indexing, aggregation, linking, and retrieval for comprehensive, heterogeneous, and distributed data sources. Solutions for knowledge extraction, semantic annotation, semantic and exploratory search, recommender systems, and question answering are developed within this context. Beyond methodological research, ISE engages in applied projects across cultural heritage, digital humanities, materials science, and research data management.

ISE is structured in two departments: Knowledge Graphs (ISE-KG) and Machine Learning (ISE-ML).

Knowledge Graphs (ISE-KG)

Semantic Web technologies represent the backbone of many research and infrastructural projects within the Knowledge Graphs department of FIZ ISE. One focus lies in efficient ontology design and the improvement of ontology design methodologies in specific application areas, as e.g., for cultural heritage or materials science. Ontologies serve as the foundation of innovative information systems via knowledge graphs, which enable semantic search and exploration. 

Significant results of these efforts are, as e.g., a Knowledge graph-based research data infrastructure for several NFDI consortia, or the mid-level PMDcore ontology covering the entire domain of materials science engineering.

Machine Learning (ISE-ML)

Key applications within the Machine Learning department of FIZ ISE are the population of knowledge graphs from unstructured data, methods of natural language processing, visual analysis, and further semantic analysis. All of which rely mostly on machine learning and deep learning technologies for information and knowledge extraction. 

One particular challenge is the frequently occurring lack of well suited or sufficient training data which motivate further research in few-shot or zero-shot learning scenarios, in particular with the help of large language models. 

Significant results in this research domain are, as e.g., the improved integration of the inherent semantics of literals in knowledge graph embeddings, or improving the state-of-the-art in Knowledge graph link prediction.

FIZ ISE @ Social Media

FIZ ISE@Mastodon

FIZ ISE@Fediverse

FIZ ISE@YouTube

Staff

""

Prof. Dr. Harald Sack

Vice President Information Service Engineering
Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
harald.sack [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
Professional Scientific Activities
""

Dr. Jörg Waitelonis

Phone:
+49 7247 808 346
+49 7247 808 346
joerg.waitelonis [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Heike Fliegl

Phone:
+49 7247 808 439
+49 7247 808 439
heike.fliegl [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr.-Ing. Genet Asefa Gesese

Phone:
+49 7247 808 186
+49 7247 808 186
genet-asefa.gesese [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Anna Jacyszyn

Phone:
+49 7247 808 443
+49 7247 808 443
anna.jacyszyn [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Kostiantyn Hubaiev

Phone:
+49 7247 808 388
+49 7247 808 388
kostiantyn.hubaiev [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Sven Hertling

Phone:
+49 7247 808 392
+49 7247 808 392
sven.hertling [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Hossein Beygi Nasrabadi

Phone:
+49 7247 808 589
+49 7247 808 589
hossein.beygi_nasrabadi [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Dr. Gunjan Singh

Phone:
+49 7247 808 414
+49 7247 808 414
gunjan.singh [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Tabea Tietz

Phone:
+49 7247 808 187
+49 7247 808 187
tabea.tietz [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Etienne Posthumus

Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
etienne.posthumus [at] partners.fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Oleksandra Bruns

Phone:
+49 7247 808 146
+49 7247 808 146
oleksandra.bruns [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Mary Ann Tan

Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
ann.tan [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Mahsa Vafaie

Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
mahsa.vafaie [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Ebrahim Norouzi

Phone:
+49 7247 808 588
+49 7247 808 588
ebrahim.norouzi [at] fiz-Karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Sarah Rebecca Ondraszek

Phone:
+49 7247 808 444
+49 7247 808 444
sarah-rebecca.ondraszek [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Marzieh Malekzadeh Mahani

Phone:
+49 7247 808 523
+49 7247 808 523
marzieh.malekzadeh_mahani [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
Curriculum Vitae and Publications
""

Marwa Torkhani

Team Assistant
Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
marwa.torkhani [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de
ISE Team

Information Service Engineering Alumni

fiz-karlsruhe.de/de/bereiche/information-service-engineering-alumni

Current Projects

MaterialDigital 2

The purpose of the MaterialDigital (PMD) platform is to standardize the handling of data in the discipline of materials science and engineering
read more

Completed Projects

News

2025

07 July, 2025
International Summer School ISWS 2025: ISE team with valuable contributions
read more

May 26, 2025
Dr. Genet Asefa Gesese included into Leibniz mentoring program
read more

May 21, 2025
History within reach – through AI
On May 17 and 18, 2025, we were represented with our own tent in the tent city of the EFFEKTE science festival in front of Karlsruhe Palace.
read more

2024

26.05.2024
Sasha Bruns, Tabea Tietz and Harald Sack, together with external partners from the University of Bologna and Vrije University Amsterdam, are organizing a workshop on "Semantic Digital Humanities", which will be held as part of ESWC 2024. The main goal is to build a bridge between technical semantic web-based solutions and the research questions of the humanities community. All information about the workshop and the "Call for Papers and Panels" are available at https://semdh.github.io/.

2023

31.01.2023
Harald Sack member of the Advisory Board of the TRIFECTA, EU ERC Consolidator Grant project.

19.01.2023
Prof. Sack gave a Keynote at EGC2023 (Conférence Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances (EGC) 2023 - Sciencesconf.org): „Symbolic and Subsymbolic AI - an Epic Dilemma?“

2022

15.12.2022-16.12.2022
ISE organises a workshop in Karlsruhe together with members of the MatWerk Task Area Ontologies for Material Sciences with the aim of adjusting the NFDI4Culture core ontology for the needs of NFDI-MatWerk  and to fill it with data.

02.12.2022
Harald Sack gives a talk with the title „Symbolic and Subsymbolic AI - an Epic Dilemma!“ at the Conference Cultures of Artificial Intelligence in the Baden State Museum.

25.11.2022
ISE organises a NFDI4Culture workshop with the aim of integrating the Knowledge Graph further into the NFDI4Culture Webportal together with members of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz.

24.11.2022
Russa Biswas verteidigt erfolgreich ihre Dissertation zum Thema „Embedding Based Link Prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion“.

03.11.2022
Jörg Waitelonis gives a talk about the sphere of activity Semantic Interoperability at the PMD plenary meeting. 

01.11.2022
Harald Sack becomes member of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA).

24.10.2022
ISE organises the 4. Internationalen Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs 2022 at the 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2022).

23.09.2022
Cristian Santini presents his talk entitled "Knowledge Extraction for Art History: the Case of Vasari's The Lives of the Artists" at the 3rd Conference on Digital Curation Technologies (Qurator2022).

13.09.2022
Harald Sack presents his talk „Social and Technical Biases in Knowledge Graphs“ within the framework of the Dagstuhl Seminar „Knowledge Graphs and their Role in the Knowledge Engineering of the 21st Century“, Schloss Dagstuhl.

08.07.2022
Harald Sack gives the dinner speech at the Gala Dinner of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School 2022 (ISWS2022) entitled: "How to give a memorable Scientific Presentation".

03.07.2022-09.07.2022
The International Semantic Web Research Summer School 2022 (ISWS2022) takes place under the direction of Harald Sack and Valentina Presutti.

24.06.2022
Oleksandra Bruns, Etienne Posthumus and Tabea Tietz win the MOST FAIR award with their team at the Coding da Vinci Culture-Hackathon Baden-Württemberg 2022:
Simeon Allmendinger, Joel Oswald, Emil Meckel, Oleksandra Bruns, Tabea Tietz, Etienne Posthumus: ansights, {COD1NG DA V1NC1} Culture-Hackathon Baden-Württemberg 2022.

28.04.2022
Harald Sack gives the talk „Pilotprojekt Wiedergutmachung Ludwigsburg - Wissenschaftlich-technische Herausforderungen und Stand der Arbeiten“ within the framework of the symposium "Unrecht erinnern – Unterlagen zur NS-Wiedergutmachung werden digital" in the State Archives Ludwigsburg.

07.03.2022
Harald Sack gives the talk „Knowledge Graphs and (WikiBase) @ nfdi4Cultur“ in the context of the virtual  NFDI InfraTalk. The video of the talk is available on YouTube.

04.02.2022
Harald Sack gives a Keynote with the title "With Knowledge Doubt Increases - The Significance of Knowledge in Knowledge Graphs" at the 6th International Conference on Graphs & Networks in the Humanities 2022. The video of the talk is available on YouTube.

31.10.2021
Harald Sack gives a talk with the title "The NFDI4Culture Knowledge Graph and WikiBase - Wikibase as RDM Infrastructure within NFDI4Culture" on the occasion of the WikiDataCon 2021.

21.10.2021
Oleksandra Bruns and Tabea Tietz present a talk with the title "Methoden und Herausforderungen einer virtuellen Forschungsumgebung am Beispiel des Projekts TOPORAZ – Nürnberger Topographie in Raum und Zeit" the 28. symposium of the working group of German and Polish monument conservators.

06.10.2021
Harald Sack and Daniel Fähle from the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg present a talk with the title „Ein digitaler Werkzeugkasten für historische Forschung mit Archivgut Status quo und Perspektiven“ anlässlich at the 53. Deutschen Historikertag, Fachsektion, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

Open Theses

ise.aifb.kit.edu/119.php

Dissertations

Master Theses

  • Vjola Cili: Leveraging Neural Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion, 2023 [local copy (PDF)]
  • Radina Sofronova: Exploiting Language Models for Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs, 2022 [local copy (PDF)]
  • Schiran Schasith Nosrati: Semantic Aggregation and Labeling of the Patent Information Space, 2022
  • Patrick Eisele: Image2Type: Entity Type Prediction via Image Analysis, 2022, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000144260, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Ilona-Dewi Kusardi: Quality Assured Information Extraction from Historical Address Books for Knowledge Graph Construction, 2021.
  • Felix Boltz: Concept-level Sentiment Analysis with  SenticNet and Word Embeddings, 2021
  • Qingyuan Bie: Words Are Not Enough! Short Text Classification Using Words and Entities, 2019, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Tatyana Skripnikova: Semantic Exploration of Text Documents with Multi-Faceted Metadata Employing Word Embeddings: The Patent Landscaping Use Case, 2019, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000098959, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Maximilian Blanck: Predicting Price Residuals in Online Car Marketplaces with Natural Language Processing, 2019, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Tabea Tietz: The Application of Semantic Web Technologies to Content Analysis in Sociology, 2018, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000092077, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Lucas Werkmeister: Schema Inference on Wikidata, 2018, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2578259. [local copy (PDF)]

Bachelor Theses

  • Rick Petzold: Combining Text and Relational Knowledge for Unsupervised Learning for Downstream Tasks, 2021
  • Anastasia Prikhodina: Handwritten and Printed Text Separation For Historical Documents, 2021, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000141960,  [local copy (PDF)]
  • Hannah Greven: Analyzing Bias in a Knowledge-Aware News Recommendation System, 2021, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000142028, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Aaron Maier: Image Recognition for the Exploration of Historical Photograph Collections, 2021
  • Benedikt Böhme, Evaluation of Fine-Grained Text Classification, 2021
  • Sven Bulach, Exploring Graph traversal Algorithms for Knowledge Graphs, 2020
  • Manuel Kaschura: Analyzing and Visualizing Twitter Streams based on Trending Hashtags, 2020, DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000127966. [local copy (PDF)]
  • Le Yang: Wikipedia List Extraction, 2020
  • Radina Sofronova: Fine-grained Type Prediction of Entities using Knowledge Graph Embeddings, 2019, DOI: 10.5445/IR/100010000, [local copy (PDF)]
  • Marc Jepsen: Temporal Signature Dataset from Wikipedia, 2019

Awards and Prizes

  • Simeon Allmendinger, Joel Oswald, Emil Meckel, Oleksandra Brun, Tabea Tietz, Etienne Posthumus: ansights (https://codingdavinci.de/de/projekte/ansights), {COD1NG DA V1NC1} Culture-Hackathon Baden-Württemberg 2022. Prize for the "Most FAIR" project. The “ansights“ project makes it possible to automatically evaluate document content and to link it to  the content of historical newspapers. ”ansights“ automatically generates keywords from uploaded documents and links them with each other. The results are visually recorded and processed based on their degree of content overlap. The application incorporates data sets from different sources: the university library of Mannheim, Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) and Wikidata.
  • Radina Sofronova, Russa Biswas, Mehwish Alam and Harald Sack
    Best Poster Paper Award at the 17th European Sematic Web Conference (ESWC 2020) for “Entity Typing based on RDF2Vec using Supervised and Unsupervised Methods”, 02.-04.06.2020
  • Tabea Tietz, Kanran Zhou, Jörg Waitelonis and Paul Felgentreff
    Linked Stage Graph using data from the Stuttgart State Theatre in the Coding da V1nc1 Süd competition: Prize for the “most useful” project, 18.05.2019.
  • Harald Sack
    Lecture „Information Service Engineering“, Summer semester 2018: In the evaluation of the 83 lectures at the KIT Faculty of Economics by the students, this lecture was one of the ten with the highest scores, 12.12.2018.
  • Rima Türker, Lei Zhang, Maria Koutraki and Harald Sack
    Honorable Mention for „,The Less Is More‘ for Text Classification“ at the 14th International Conference on Semantic Systems 2018 (SEMANTiCS 2018), 10.-13.09.2018.

Teaching

Inaugural lecture as video

Publications

Information Service Engineering @ Google Scholar

Information Service Engineering @ GitHub

2025 Publications

  • Gesese, G.A., Chen, Z., Zoubia, O., Limani, F., Silva, K., Suryani, M.A., Zapilko, B., Castro, L.J., Kutafina, E., Solanki, D., Fliegl, H., Schimmler, S., Boukhers, Z. and Sack, H., 2025. A Survey on Metadata for Machine Learning Models and Datasets: Standards, Practices, and Harmonization Challenges. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 4065). https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4065/paper05.pdf [bibTeX]
  • Silva, K., Ackermann, M.R., Fliegl, H., Gesese, G.A., Limani, F., Mayr, P., Mutschke, P., Oelen, A., Suryani, M.A., Upadhyaya, S., Zapilko, B., Sack, H. and Dietze, S. 2025. Research Knowledge Graphs in NFDI4DataScience: Key Activities, Achievements, and Future Directions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02300. [bibTeX]
  • Ahmad, R.A., Abdulla, R., Taffa, T.A., Auer, S., Giglou, H.B., Borisova, E., Chen, Z., Dietze, S., DSouza, J., Elwes, M. and Gesese, G.A., Jiang, S., Kutafina, E., Mayr, P., Rehm, G., Sadruddin, S., Schimmler, S., Schneider, D., Silva, K., Upadhyaya, S. and Usbeck, R., 2025. NFDI4DS Shared Tasks for Scholarly Document Processing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.22141.  [bibTeX]
  • O. Bruns, A. Graciotti, B. Sartini, and T. Tietz (Eds): Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Semantic Digital Humanities (SemDH 2025) co-located with ESWC 2025. CEUR workshop proceedings, vol. 4009 ,CEUR-WS.org, 2025, online at: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4009/
  • Söhn, L. C., Tietz, T., Steller, J. J., Kehrein, P., Büttner, A., Bruns, O., Posthumus, E., Grünewälder, J.-P., Hörnschemeyer, J., Sander, C., Grund, V., Fliegl, H., Sack, H., & Schrade, T. (2025). NFDI4Culture Integration Stories: Bridging Gaps between isolated Research Resources. Digital Humanities 2025: Accessibility & Citizenship (DH2025), Lisbon, Portugal. Zenodo. [bibtex] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16570076
    Poster: https://zenodo.org/records/15878213
  • Jiang, S., Tan, M. A., Sack, H., MathD2: Towards Disambiguation of Mathematical Terms, in Proc. of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025), pp. 17–30, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics. [local copy(pdf)|bibtex]
  • Mehwish Alam, Genet Asefa Gesese, and Pierre-Henri Paris. "Neurosymbolic Methods for Dynamic Knowledge Graphs." Handbook on Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (2025).
  • A. Jacyszyn, S. Jiang, G. A. Gesese, S. Hertling, T. Kerzenmacher, P. Nowack, S. Barthlott, E. Posthumus, H. Sack, AI4DiTraRe: Towards LLM-Based Information Extraction for Standardising Climate Research Repositories. First AAAI Bridge on Artificial Intelligence for Scholarly Communication AI4SC; co-located with the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25) (AI4SC), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. CC-BY 4.0, 2025 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14872359, hal-04957799 [local copy(pdf)|bibtex]
  • Alam, M., Rospocher, M., van Erp, M., Hollink, L. and Gesese, G.A. Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: 24th International Conference, EKAW 2024,  Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS, vol. 15370, Springer Cham, 2025 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77792-9 [bibtex]
  • Gesese, G. A., Sack, H., Paulheim, H., Meroño-Peñuela, A., Chen, L.: Proceedings of the Workshop on Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs (GenAIK 2025) @COLING2025, Int. Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), CC-BY-4.0, 2025 [local copy(pdf)|bibtex]
  • Raia Abu Ahmad, Reham Alharbi, Roberto Barile, Martin Böckling, Francisco Bolanos, Sara Bonfitto, Oleksandra Bruns, Irene Celino, Yashrajsinh Chudasama, Martin Critelli, Claudia d'Amato, Giada D'Ippolito, Ioannis Dasoulas, Stefano De Giorgis, Vincenzo De Leo, Chiara Di Bonaventura, Marco Di Panfilo, Daniil Dobriy, John Domingue, Xuemin Duan, Michel Dumontier, Sefika Efeoglu, Ruben Eschauzier, Fakih Ginwa, Nicolas Ferranti, Arianna Graciotti, Philipp Hanisch, George Hannah, Golsa Heidari, Aidan Hogan, Hassan Hussein, Alexane Jouglar, Jan-Christoph Kalo, Manoé Kieffer, Antonis Klironomos, Inês Koch, Weronika Lajewska, Nicolas Lazzari, Mikael Lindekrans, Anna Sofia Lippolis, Majlinda Llugiqi, Eleonora Mancini, Eleonora Marzi, Laura Menotti, Daniela Milon Flores, Soulakshmee Nagowah, Kerstin Neubert, Emetis Niazmand, Ebrahim Norouzi, Beatriz Olarte Martinez, Anouk Michelle Oudshoorn, Andrea Poltronieri, Valentina Presutti, Disha Purohit, Ensiyeh Raoufi, Celian Ringwald, Johanna Rockstroh, Sebastian Rudolph, Harald Sack, Zafar Saeed, Mohammad Javad Saeedizade, Aya Sahbi, Cristian Santini, Aleksandra Simic, Dennis Sommer, Rita Sousa, Mary Ann Tan, Vidyashree Tarikere, Tabea Tietz, Liam Tirpitz, Arnaldo Tomasino, Frank van Harmelen, Joao Vissoci, Caitlin Woods, Bohui Zhang, Xinyue Zhang, Heng Zheng, Semantic Web and Creative AI - A Technical Report from ISWS 2023, arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18542, 2025. [local copy(pdf)|bibtex]

2024 Publications

2023 Publications

further volumes

""
Contact

Prof. Dr. Harald Sack

Vice President Information Service Engineering
Phone:
+49 7247 808 195
+49 7247 808 195
harald.sack [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de