· Integration of Semantic Web Services and Grid technologies - challenges and implications
Presenter: Radek Wegrowski
Dates:      Wednesday, 14 September 2005
Time:       14:00 Galway time
Location:  The presentation will be by videolink in Room 115, DERI, Galway from DERI, Innsbruck

Abstract
Grid Computing offers technologies that enable coordinated resource sharing and problem solving between distributed entities. The last few years have proved the ability to incorporate Service Oriented Architecture into the Grid. The Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) has changed the philosophy of utilizing resources by grid applications, thus showing its convergence with web services standards. However, the actual state of the grid is still lacking the infrastructure to allow the machine processable semantics to make use of the grid services. The latest WS-Resource Framework specification (a refactoring of OGSI) has made a step forward to help integrate Semantic Web Services and Grid Services.
In my presentation I will introduce the Grid concept, its correlation and similarities with Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services, as well as the challenges and implications of SWS and Grid integration.

Bio: Radek Wegrowski
Software Developer
Comarch SA
Cracow, Poland
www.comarch.com

Radek holds a double MSc degree in Computer Science and in Economics, both procured at the Karol Adamiecki University of Economics in Katowice. Since April 2004 he has been working for Comarch SA (Poland) on the position of a software developer. During his work for the company he has been responsible for design and development issues of The EGERIA Financial-Accounting System implemented for The Polish Agricultural Market Agency (modules: HRM, Payment Regisrtation, EAGGF Reporting and Accountancy). He has been also involved in the Oracle 9i database administration duties (He holds an Oracle Database Administration Certificate).
In his research interests area he has been focusing on the Semantic Web Services and Grid technologies. He sees the future of wide-spread semantic grid services and the notion of innumerable applications operating on them.

· SweetRules - An Integrated Set of tools for Semantic Web Rules and Ontologies
Presenter: Benjamin Grosof, MIT Sloan School of Management
Dates:      Tuesday, 7 June 2005
Time:       13:00 Galway time
Location:  The presentation will be by videolink in Room 115, DERI, Galway from DERI, Innsbruck

Abstract
The seminar will deal with SweetRules which is an integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies, revolving around RuleML (Rule Markup/Modeling Language), a rule language for the Semantic Web. SweetRules is implemented in Java and it supports also SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), along with the OWL standard for semantic web ontologies. (c.f. http://sweetrules.projects.semwebcentral.org/)  

Bio: Benjamin Grosof
Benjamin Grosof is Assistant Professor in Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before that, he was a senior research scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is the pioneer of inter-operable XML business rules and he co-leads the RuleML emerging industry standards effort. He designed and leads the SweetRules open source software community platform toolkit for semantic web rules.

Details
The list of presentations and their authors along with the powerpoint files containing the presentation slides are available at the DERI publications.presentations page.

This talk will focus on the use of workflow patterns to evaluate standards and tools. In addition it will discuss a new language - YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) -inspired by these patterns.
 

Bio: Prof.dr.ir.Wil van der Aalst

Prof.dr.ir.Wil van der Aalst is a full professor of Information Systems and head of the Information Systems sub-department of the department of Technology Management at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. He is also an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Information Technology of Queensland University of Technology. He holds an MSc in Computing Science (1988) and a PhD in Mathematics (1992) awarded by the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. From 1992 until 1999 he worked as an assistant/associate professor for the department of Mathematics and Computing Science at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, where he supervised the SMIS research group from 1996 until 1999. From 1993-1998 he also worked as a part-time consultant for Bakkenist. He has been a visiting professor to several universities including the Universitt Karlsruhe (5 months), the University of Georgia (5 months), the University of Colorado (8 months), and Queensland University of Technology (3 months). Wil van der Aalst directs the Eindhoven Digital Laboratory for Business Processes (EDL-BP) and is a fellow and management team member of the research institute BETA. His research interests include business process management, information systems, simulation, Petri nets, process models, workflow management systems, process mining, verification techniques, enterprise resource planning systems, computer supported cooperative work, and interorganizational business processes. He published more than 200 books, journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and reports on these topics.

· Service Portfolio Measurement — A Framework for Evaluating the Financial Consequences of Out-tasking Decisions

Presenters: Dr. Jan vom Brocke, Maik A. Lindner, European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS)
Dates: 29 November 2004
Time: 14:00 GMT, 15:30 GMT
Location: DERI, NUI, Galway videolink to DERI, University of Innsbruck

Abstract
Topical developments in software-engineering facilitate the establishment of new design patterns for information systems. In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), processes of an information system can be extracted and “out-tasked” to service providers. KEEN/MCDONALD highlight the changes that are brought about by such an architecture with their statement „Out-tasking […] breaks a company into a portfolio of process-centered operations rather than interlocking departments or functions.” Examples of technologies that have been developed for this purpose are COM+, CORBA und RMI. With the initiative of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), web-services turn out in practice to enable a widely spread realization of SOA.

With these technological achievements, new management tasks are arising in information systems science. As information systems are increasingly interlinked with other systems by various service providers, it is important to choose the appropriate composition of a corporate service portfolio. For this purpose, the long-term economic consequences of out-tasking decisions have to be taken into account. We suggest a methodological framework for efficiency calculations that intends to suit for a proper evaluation of these consequences. Due to the long-term consequences of information systems design, methods of capital budgeting are applied in the framework. Using Financial Plans (VOFI), all payments driven by a decision can be taken into account, including various conditions for funding and loaning as well as taxes. We apply this method by analyzing typical in- and out-payments driven by outtasking decisions that have to be taken into account throughout the life-cycle of serviceoriented information systems.

For evaluation purposes, efficiency measures need to be calculated. These measures indicate which composition of the service portfolio is most profitable in a certain corporate situation. We will demonstrate how to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as well as the Return on Investment (ROI) of a Service Portfolio on the basis of capital budgeting. Finally, perspectives will be discussed for applying and extending the framework for Service Portfolio Measurement.

Bios:

Dr. Jan vom Brocke

Dr. Jan vom Brocke is Assistant Professor at the Department for Information Systems at the University of Muenster and scientist at the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) in Germany. He has worked for industry as well as consultancy companies and has research and teaching experience at the universities of Muenster, Bielefeld, Saarbrücken, Bucharest, Tartu and Dublin. The work of Dr. Jan vom Brocke is characterised by a significant link between information systems engineering and management accounting. He is one of the founding members of the Freestyle Learning Group, which carries out the development of OpenSource E-Learning-Systems. On the basis of these systems Dr. Jan vom Brocke established knowledge networks for Controlling Science as well as for Internet Economics throughout Germany. Dr. Jan vom Brocke has published many papers in various journals, books, and conference proceedings. Moreover he is coauthor and editor of text books on systems engineering and accounting.
http://www.vom-brocke.de

MScIS Maik A. Lindner

Maik A. Lindner is Researcher, Lecturer and PhD student at the Department for Information Systems at the University of Muenster. Like Dr. Jan vom Brocke he is also scientist at the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) in Germany. Last year he received his MSc in Information Systems. His master thesis was about the use of web services within the e-Procurement concerning requirements, design alternatives and success factors. His current research deals with the Controlling of Service-oriented Architectures

Further information about ERCIS: http://www.ercis.de/ERCIS/en/index.html

Bio: Dr. Hamish Cunningham
Hamish Cunnigham is part of the Natural Language Processing group which hangs out in the Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing, our section of which is in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, England, the UK, Europe, The World.  
 
Hamish runs the GATE project, the MUSE project (with Yorick), and Sheffield's part of the MUMIS project. MUMIS and MUSE are Information Extraction projects. I also work on the Advanced Knowledge Technologies project which is related to the semantic web. I look after purchasing and administration strategy for the NLP group compute environment.   
 
For more on SWAN see the Projects page at www.deri.ie
For more about Hamish Cunningham, see http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish/

For more information on this talk contact Matthew Moran.

To learn more about his work, please visit his home page:
http://www-kasm.nii.ac.jp/~takeda/index.html

Bio: Dr. Hideaki Takeda
Hideaki Takeda is a professor at National Institute of Informatics (NII) and a professor in Department of Informatics at the Graduate University of Advanced Studies (Sokendai). He received his Doctor of Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1991. His research interest in computer science includes ontology engineering, community informatics, and knowledge sharing systems. His e-mail address is takeda@nii.ac.jp.

For more information on this talk contact Matthew Moran.

Bio: Dr. Michael Kifer
Michael Kifer is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook (USA). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1985 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and the M.S. degree in Mathematics in 1976 from Moscow University, Russia.

Dr. Kifer's interests include database systems, knowledge representation, and Web information systems. He has published two text books and numerous articles in these areas. In 1999 and 2002 he was a recipient of the ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards for his works on F-logic and object-oriented database languages.

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

Bio: Dr. Charles J. Petrie
Dr. Petrie was a Founding Member of Technical Staff of the AI Lab founded by Prof. Woody Bledsoe at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Consortium (MCC) in 1984, Project Leader of the first technology commercialized by MCC, Founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing, and Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Networking Research Center, where he currently serves as Staff Scientist to a mature organization. Dr. Petrie has been often asked to write and speak on Internet futures. He was invited to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to speak on the occasion of the founding of the Internet in that country, has written opinions extensively for IEEE Internet Computing, and gave a predictive invited lecture in Stockholm in 2001 on the future impact of the wireless Internet.

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

Bio: Professor Dr. eva Kühn
Dr. eva Kühn holds the titles graduated engineer of computer sciences (Dipl. Ing.), Ph.D. (Dr. techn.) and Venia Docendi (Univ. Doz.) from the University of Technology, Vienna. She received the Heinz-Zemanek research award for the her Ph.D. work on "Multi Database Systems" and a Kurt-Gödel Research Grant from the Austrian Government for a sabbatical at the Indiana Center for Databases at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. Dr. Kühn is employed as a.o. Univ. Prof. at the University of Technology Vienna, Institute of Computer Languages, since 1984.
Dr. Kühn has published more than 40 international articles in the areas of multi-database integration, heterogeneous transaction processing, parallel and distributed programming and coordination languages. Her current teaching topics are parallel processing and coordination tools. She has served as conference chair, program committee member and local arrangement coordinator for many international conferences.
In 1997, an Austrian patent was registered for her research work on a new "coordination system" - the European patent was granted in 2001, the US patent is pending. Based on these patents, Dr. Kühn founded the company tecco Coordination Systems in April 1997. tecco develops and markets the middleware system CORSO, which is a lean, peer-to-peer based, virtual shared memory system and CORSO based products. Main CORSO application areas are enterprise application integration and replication, collaboration of mobile computers and workflow management. Since 1997, Dr. Kühn is managing director and chief technical officer of tecco.
 

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

Bio: Professor Michael Genesereth
Michael Genesereth is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathemetics from Harvard University. Prof. Genesereth is most known for his work on computational logic and applications of that work in enterprise computing. He was program chairman for the 1983 AAAI conference and the 1997 International World Wide Web Conference. He is the current director of the Center for Information Technology at Stanford.
 

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

Bio: Dr. Charles J. Petrie
Dr. Petrie was a Founding Member of Technical Staff of the AI Lab founded by Prof. Woody Bledsoe at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Consortium (MCC) in 1984, Project Leader of the first technology commercialized by MCC, Founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing, and Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Networking Research Center, where he currently serves as Staff Scientist to a mature organization. Dr. Petrie has been often asked to write and speak on Internet futures. He was invited to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to speak on the occasion of the founding of the Internet in that country, has written opinions extensively for IEEE Internet Computing, and gave a predictive invited lecture in Stockholm in 2001 on the future impact of the wireless Internet.
 

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

BIO
Nicholas Kushmerick is a member of the Computer Science Department at University College Dublin. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1997. He is interested in the application of machine learning and other AI techniques to a variety of problems in information extraction and retrieval. Nick has received substantial research funding from Enterprise Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, and the US Office of Naval Research.
 

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

For more information on these talks contact Matthew Moran.

The Unified Problem-Solving Method description Language (UPML) is an architectural description language specialized for a specific type of systems providing components, adapters and their connection configuration.

In this talk we present Meta-Web services towards the dynamic composition of Web services using problem-solving approach of UPML. The aim of Meta-Web
service is to generate a composite Web service description independent of platforms and many proposed service description languages.

For more information contact Matthew Moran.

- Introduction to General Enterprise Reference Architecture----the importance of system architecture on enterprise integration
- The gap between theoretical research and industrial practice
- What should be extended
- Why people pay more and more attention to process improvement
- How to improve----introduce process modeling tools and analysis methods
- Conclusion

2. "System Architecture Should Explicitly Include the Elements of Economy"

- why it is necessary to have an economic view to be involved in General Enterprise Reference Architecture
- What problems economic view should answer?
- The possible modeling framework of economic view
- Necessary future work

For more information contact Matthew Moran.

Gaining access to sensitive resources on the Web usually involves an explicit registration step, where the client has to provide a predetermined set of information to the server. The registration process yields a login/password combination, a cookie, or something similar that can be used to access the sensitive resources. An explicit registration step can be avoided on the Semantic Web by using appropriate semantic annotations, rule-oriented access control policies, and automated trust negotiation. A implementation of implicit registration and authentication that runs under the Java-based MINERVA Prolog engine is already available. The implementation includes a PeerTrust policy applet and evaluator, facilities to import local metadata, policies and credentials, and secure communication channels between all parties.

For more information contact Matthew Moran.

· We search for semantic correspondences by mapping meanings (concepts), and not labels, as in syntactic matching; when mapping concepts, it is not sufficient to consider the meanings of labels of the nodes, but also the positions that the nodes have in the graph.

· We use semantic similarity relations between elements (concepts) instead of syntactic similarity relations. In particular, we consider relations, which relate the extensions of the concepts under consideration (for instance, more/less general relations).

The contributions to the state of the art are (i) a rational reconstruction of the major matching problems and their articulation in terms of the more generic problem of matching graphs; (ii) the identification of semantic matching as a new approach for performing generic matching; and (iii) a proposal of using SAT as a possible way of implementing semantic matching.

For more information contact Matthew Moran.

· Advanced Programming with Frame-based Logic Languages - Tutorial

Tutor: Michael Kifer, Stony Brook University of New York
Dates: 5-7 January 2004
Details: http://www.deri.at/events/meetings/tutorials/kifer_050104
Location: DERI, NUI Galway videolink to DERI, University of Innsbruck, Room 115 Science and Technology Buillding

Michael Kifer from the Stony Brook University of New York, involved in the development of both F-Logic and HiLog and currently co-chair of the SWSI Language committee, will be coming to Innsbruck from 5 until 7 January 2004 to give a tutorial on Programming with Frame-based logic languages.
The tutorial will consist of two parts: a theoretical part, with an intensive tutorial on Frame-based logic languages and a practical part, consisting of a hands-on training of Advanced Programming with Frame-based Logic Languages using the F-Logic based tool FLORA2.
There is the possibility to follow the tutorial via a videoconferencing link at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. Please contact Jos de Bruijn if you would like to participate in the tutorial in Innsbruck and contact Matt Moran if you would like to participate in Galway.

Schedule:
18h00-20h00 (CET) (1 hour invited talk, 1 hour round table)

Discussions of technologies for developing the Semantic Web tend to concentrate on languages for building ontologies and interfaces for implementing Web services. Often missing from these discussions is mention of the tools that will allow developers to build and maintain ontologies and the basic software components that will facilitate the rapid implementation of Web services. "Web languages" such as OWL seem to have been designed with minimal attention to how system builders actually will use the languages to edit ontologies, and Web services to date have focused almost purely on domain tasks, rather than on generic methods that can automate those tasks.

The knowledge-based systems community has considerable experience in the construction of tools to build localized intelligent problem solvers. The approaches that have been explored have great potential for the creation of distributed problem solvers for the Semantic Web. This work offers the opportunity to fill some of the gaps in building pragmatic Web-based architectures.

Work at Stanford on the Protege project, in particular, highlights how knowledge-based-systems technology translates to the Web, and clarifies some of the challenges that need to be addressed to make distributed intelligent problem solvers as ubiquitous as the Web itself.

· Planning for Web Services

Tutor: Mark Carman, Trento University
Dates: 11 December 2003, 9am
Details: Related papers
Location: DERI, NUI Galway videolink to DERI, University of Innsbruck, Room 115 Science and Technology Buillding

Mark Carman is a PhD student in Trento who has been doing his PhD research on Planning for Semantic Web for around 2 years now
Schedule:
09:00 - 10:00 Planning for Web Services
10:00 - 10:30 by Ruben Lara (but title and presentation not fixed yet)
10:30 - 11:30 intensive discussion