Maral is a postdoctoral researcher at the Web-based Information Systems and Services Group at Stuttgart Media University in Germany, and a member of LIBER’s Linked Open Data Working Group.

“I am currently the contextualization team leader in FID-Judaica, a national funded project, which aims to create a specialized knowledge-base in LOD format for enrichment of library collections. My research interests lie in the areas of information retrieval, data integration, and natural language processing while I am also heavily focused on Linked Open Data and social media information analysis.”

She received her PhD degree from Human Media Interaction group at University of Twente in the Netherlands. During her PhD, Maral mostly worked on identification and prevention of online crimes with a special focus on cyberbullying and online trafficking. She also holds a MSc in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Sheffield.

In addition, Maral is a member of the Global Young Academy, a SpringerNature SciGraph hack day award winner, has generated a highly cited dataset for cyberbullying studies and is passionate about, and active in, promoting women in science.

In the past two years I have been closely working with library data collections and enrichment of their metadata as well as their full-text. Moreover, we are designing a platform to make all this openly accessible and reusable.

By experience, I have come to realize the importance of having unified guidelines to make sure that the developed tools and data are re-usable, interoperable and can be easily integrated into other platforms or linked to other resource.

I believe that this working group as part of LIBER can be the opportunity and the right platform to address these issues and to come up with best practices and tools to make the library data collections openly available according to unified LOD principles.