Archive

On this page given talks are listed.

Uncertainty and Vagueness in Semantic Web Languages

Dr. Umberto Straccia

Istituto di Scienze e di Tecnologie dell'Informazione

Abstract

There is currently a strong interest in using and extending AI techniques, systems, and concepts to the World Wide Web. In particular, managing uncertainty and/or vagueness is starting to play an important role in Semantic Web research.

Our aim is at making attendees familiar with the concepts and techniques for representing and reasoning with uncertain and vague knowledge in current Semantic Web ontology and rule languages, such as RDFS, OWL, RIF, (and their combination), which should help the attendees to get insights on main features and practical and theoretical problems of the formalisms and tools proposed so far.

Bio: Dr. Umberto Straccia

Umberto Straccia was born in 1965 in Zurich (Switzerland), and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund (Germany), obtained in 1999.

He is currently researcher at the "Istituto di Scienze e di Tecnologie dell'Informazione" (ISTI) of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR).

He's main research interests include in the broad sense Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) and Information Retrieval (IR). In particular, he has interests in logics for KRR and the Semantic Web. More specifically, concerning KRR: Description Logics, Logic Programming, Non-Monotonic Reasoning, Uncertainty and Many-valued Logics, Logics for Multimedia Data Representation and Retrieval, Logic and the Semantic Web, Ontology Alignment, Top-k Retrieval, e-Matchmaking and Multi-Criteria Decision making. Concerning IR: Distributed Information Retrieval, Schema Matching, Collaborative and Information Filtering, Rank Aggregation, User Profiling. Additional interests are in the field of mathematics: Fixed-point Theory of Multivalued Functions, Equational Systems over Lattices.

For more information, see http://www.straccia.info

Date:

11th of June 2010

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Semantic Approaches for Searching and Managing Medical Images and Text -- Research Project THESEUS-MEDICO

Pinar Wennerberg

Siemens Corporate Technology (Research and Development) Knowledge Management Group Munich, Germany

Abstract

Medical images contain valuable information, which is not utilized, as this is not linked to the images in a machine-processable form. Furthermore, the related textual data such as radiology reports or scientific publications are most often stored elsewhere, so that finding the coherent set of patient images and text becomes a significant challenge.

The German government funded research project THESEUS-Medico [1] addresses these problems by taking a semantic approach, which is based on annotating patient images and radiology reports using medical ontologies. The coherent set of data relevant to the user's query will then be retrieved on the basis of the annotations.

This talk will first introduce the MEDICO project. Then it will report on various knowledge engineering activities with particular focus on ontology modularization involving Radiology Lexicon [2] and Foundational Model of Anatomy [3] ontologies. Finally, it will outline natural language processing applied to radiology reports.

[1]http://www.theseus-programm.de/en-US/home/default.aspx [2]http://www.rsna.org/RadLex/index.cfm [3]http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/projects/fm/AboutFM.html

Bio: Pinar Wennerberg

Pinar Wennerberg is a doctoral researcher at the Siemens Corporate Technology (Research and Development) in the Knowledge Management Group based in Munich, Germany. Previously she worked as a scientific researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (JRC) in technology field Web Intelligence (EMM) and Language Technology based in Ispra, Italy. Her current research focus is on semantic processing, corpus analysis, information extraction, text mining in the medical domain, particularly information extraction from clinical text, ontology modularization, ontology alignment and integration

Date:

04th of June 2010

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Social Networks and Interactive Management: interdependent problems and interdependent solutions

Dr. Michael Hogan

School of Psychology, NUI, Galway

Abstract

Many of the problems we face require knowledge and input from many individuals. The resolution of these problems often requires some modicum of higher-order relational or systems thinking that allow groups of individuals with a vested interest in common problems to see clearly the structure of their problems and design and plan action sequences that help them to resolve their problems in an efficient and effective manner. The systems science methods developed by John Warfield and his colleagues offer great power and potential in this context. Specifically, Interactive Management (IM) allows a group of individuals with a vested interest in solving a problem to design problematiques (i.e., graphical influence structures) that describe causal relationships between a large set of problems in a problem field. IM taps into and enhances our largely underdeveloped cognitive capacity for graphical, systems things. It enhances the collaborative power and action potential of groups who seek to work together toward the resolution of problems and the realization of possibilities. The IM method has been applied successfully in the resolution of manufacturing and service problems in American industry, conflict resolution between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and the design of new infrastructure in China and Mexico (Broome, 2006; Warfield, 2006; Warfield & Cárdenas, 1994). With an understanding of their common goals, and with insight into the structure of their problems, a group using IM can design action structures that help them to solve their problems and achieve their goals. There is scope for IM to be integrated into a Web 2.0 interface, thus making IM more widely available to a variety of social networks and more functional for groups working at a distance. There is also scope for IM to be integrated with web-based knowledge systems that facilitate groups making critical decisions during their design of influence structures. I advocate a Pragmatic Web of Systems Science Action, a project envisaged as a collaboration between the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change (CISC), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), the School of Psychology, and the School of Education. I believe that many of the “problems of development” we strive to solve collectively can be better solved if we work together using systems science tools.

Bio: Dr. Michael Hogan

Michael Hogan graduated with First Class Honours from NUI, Galway. In his undergraduate years he was the PSI's Young Irish Psychologist of the year 1994. He received this award for his research on the relationship between developmental automaticity and intelligence. Michael was also winner of the Gold Medal Award in 1st, 2nd and 3rd Arts. Michael traveled to the U.S. after his undergraduate, where he spent a year working in a Brain Injury clinic as a life skills trainer. He returned the following year to accept a PhD fellowship award at NUI, Galway. His PhD topic was 'A critical analysis of Generalized Slowing and Common Cause Models of Ageing' (NUI, Galway, 2000). He continued his research in the field of ageing cognition as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto where he worked with Lynn Hasher on the relationship between circadian arousal and learning in younger and older adults (Experimental Ageing Research) and with Fergus Craik on the impact of attention switching on memory in younger and older adults (Experimental Ageing Research). Michael returned to Ireland to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin. Working with Brian Lawlor and Ian Robertson he secured HRB funding for a research project that examined the relationship between event-related potential (ERP) variability and ageing memory (published in Brain Research). During this period he also accepted a visiting scholar position at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he worked with Jochen Kaiser on EEG coherence changes in Alzheimer ’s disease (published in International Journal of Psychophysiology). He was appointed to the staff in NUI, Galway in 2001.

Michael’s research interests have broadened over time, but he maintains a core focus on lifespan development grounded in the philosophical framework of pragmatic systems science. Michael is currently working on his second book, which elaborates his developmental perspective. The book examines some of the problems and possibilities of human ageing and adaptation. The analysis is focused largely on adult development but is couched within a lifespan, evolutionary, ecological, and philosophical frame. The primary aim of the book is to further promote the synthesis of pragmatism and systems science in the field of psychological science. Specifically, there are forms of systems science rooted in pragmatism that focus on the design of problematiques that help individuals and groups to see the structure of problems and consider actions that will resolve problems. In the context of a discussion of emotional, cognitive, and social problems and possibilities, Michael will demonstrate the potential value of pragmatic systems science for those involved in the design of environments that impinge upon human ageing and adaptation. Michael has recently spent some time doing research at Harvard University (working with Kurt Fischer on EEG coherence and learning), Arizona State University (working with Alex Zautra and Mary Davis on resilience and mindfulness), Frankfurt University (working with Jochen Kaiser on EEG and ageing memory), and Aberdeen and Edinburgh (working with Roger Staff and Ian Deary on the role of the cerebellum in ageing cognition). Michael has published in the following broad areas: Systems Science and Integral Frameworks (in Systems Research and Behavioral Science); behavioral and electrophysiological aspects of executive control, learning and memory (Experimental Ageing Research; Brain Research; International Journal of Psychophysiology; Cognitive Brain Research; Neuropsychobiology); Physical activity and ageing cognition (International Journal of Human Ageing and Development); Emotion and Cognition in younger and older adults (Experimental Ageing Research); Emotion and cardiovascular responding ( International Journal of Behavioral Medicine); The cerebellum and aging cognition (Cortex); Positive Psychology (The Journal of Positive Psychology); Critical Thinking and Education (Educational Research and Reviews; Thinking Skills and Creativity); Argument Mapping (Thinking Skills and Creativity); Chronic Pain (PAIN; European Journal of Psychological Assessment); Spirituality (Nova Science Publishers; Thinking Skills and Creativity); and Mindfulness (The Irish Psychologist). Michael’s first book, The culture of our thinking in relation to spirituality, provides part of the philosophical perspective that shapes his research focus on pragmatic systems science.

Date:

05th of May 2010

Time:

03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Guidelines to Publishing your Research Output

Professor H.S. Jagdev (Hari)

DERI & University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Abstract

One of the imperatives of scientific research and development is to exploit the final outcomes. This exploitation may take the form of marketable products, or in most circumstances, publication(s) in reputed conferences and journals. These publications, by virtue of going through peer review process, will reflect on your standing as a researcher. The talk will discuss various channels through which you can disseminate your research results. It will present a systematic way of writing scientific papers – the structure, the dos, the don’ts, etc. The material of the talk is primarily based on Hari’s experience as Editor of an International Journal.

The structure of the talk will be informal in nature and the attendees will be encouraged to ask questions. After the talk, if required, Hari will be available for one-to-one session or small group discussions.

Bio: Professor H.S. Jagdev (Hari)

Professor Harinder Singh Jagdev is presently adjunct professor at Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland at Galway and visiting Professor at the Faculty of Management & Organisation, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in Mechanical Engineering in 1974. After working for two years as Production Engineer at Mercedes Benz, he joined UMIST, where he gained M.Sc. (1977) and Ph.D. (1980) in Manufacturing Technology from Victoria University of Manchester. Between 1980 and 2007, he held various academic positions at UMIST in Manufacturing and Machine Tools Engineering Division, Control Systems Centre, and Computation Department. In 2007, he elected to take early retirement from full-time teaching to pursue other interests.

Since 1980, he has researched for and been consultant to many organisations in Europe. He is also very active in the EU-funded research programmes, both as a proposal and project reviewer on behalf of the Commission and member of the research consortia. He is the editor of journal Computers in Industry and until 2007 served the editorial board of Production Planning and Control. His research interests encompass all aspects of manufacturing/business activities – taken in the broadest sense.

Date:

01st of March 2010

Time:

02:30 PM - 03:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI, Conference Room

Distributed Nonmonotonic Multi-Context Systems

Minh Dao-Tran, Thomas Krennwallner (joint work with Thomas Eiter, Michael Fink)

TU Wien

Abstract

We present a distributed algorithm for computing equilibria of heterogeneous nonmonotonic multi-context systems (MCS). The algorithm can be parametrized to compute only partial equilibria, which can be used for reasoning tasks like query answering or satisfiability checking that need only partial information and not whole belief states. Furthermore, caching is employed to cut redundant solver calls. As a showcase, we instantiate the MCS framework with answer set program contexts. To characterize equilibria of such MCS, we develop notions of loop formulas that enable reductions to the classical satisfiability problem (SAT). Notably, loop formulas for bridge rules between contexts and for the local contexts can be combined to a uniform encoding of an MCS into a (distributed) SAT instance. As a consequence, we can use SAT solvers for belief set building. We demonstrate this approach by an experimental prototype implementation, which uses an off-the-shelf SAT solver.

Bio: Minh Dao-Tran and Thomas Krennwallner (joint work with Thomas Eiter and Michael Fink)

* Minh Dao-Tran obtained an engineering diploma with specialization in Computer Science from Hanoi University of Technology (HUT), Vietnam in 2004 with first class honor. In the next two years, he worked as a lecturer at Faculty of Information Technology (FIT-HUT) before participating in the European Master's Program in Computational Logic in New University of Lisbon (UNL) and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) in 2006, and earned his Double Master's Degree in June 2008.

At present, he works as a research assistant at the Knowledge-Based Systems group at TU Wien, lead by Prof. Thomas Eiter, in the Austrian Science Fund project "Modular HEX-Programs."

His research interests include: Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Multi-Context Systems, Description Logics, and Logic Programming.

* Thomas Krennwallner started in June 2008 as a research assistant at the Knowledge-Based Systems Group at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria, funded by the Austrian Science Fund project Modular HEX-Programs. Before that he was a research intern at DERI Galway in the EU FP6 project inContext. He obtained a master's degree in Computational Intelligence in 2007 at TU Wien. He is currently pursuing his PhD under supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Eiter and Dr. Michael Fink.

His research interests include Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, especially Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. Currently, he is working on developing extensions and algorithms for modular and distributed evaluation of HEX-programs, modular nonmonotonic logic programs, and heterogeneous nonmonotonic multi-context systems.

Date:

08th of December 2009

Time:

01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Semantic Dialogue and Semantic Search: Two sides of the same coin?

Daniel Sonntag

Intelligent User Interface Department at DFKI, The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (http://www.dfki.de)

Abstract

The idea of the Semantic Web provides new opportunities for semantically-enabled user interfaces. The explicit representation of the meaning of data allows us to (1) transcend traditional keyboard and mouse interaction metaphors, and (2) provide representation structures for more complex interaction scenarios that aim to address semantic information sources.

In this talk I will give an overview of DFKI’s Semantic Dialogue Shell developed in the context of the THESEUS project. THESEUS is the German flagship project on the Internet of Services, where the user can delegate complex tasks to dynamically composed semantic web services by utilising multimodal interaction.

Over the last years, we have adhered strictly to the developed rule “No presentation without representation.” The idea is to implement a generic, and semantic, dialogue shell that can be configured for and applied to domain-specific dialogue applications. The dialogue system also acts as the middleware between the clients and the backend services. The spoken dialogue input is used to generate SPARQL queries to address information sources such as DBpedia, Yago, or YouTube. The backend system also integrates multiple Linked Data sources.

We will describe our semantic search architecture in two specific use-case scenarios: In the first scenario, a user is interested in music and is able to retrieve musician’s information using natural speech. In the second use case scenario, we examine first ideas on the applicability of Linked Data, in particular a subset of the Linked Open Drug Data (LODD), to connect radiology, human anatomy, and drug information for improved medical image annotation and subsequent search. We will explain this with an example in the THESEUS use case Medico.

Whereas the dialogue-based access to keyword-based search engines has only moderate success, semantic (ontology-based) interpretations of dialogue utterances may become the key advancement in semantic search, thereby mediating and addressing dynamic semantic search engines which are already freely available.

Bio: Daniel Sonntag

Dr. Daniel Sonntag is a senior research scientist at the Intelligent User Interface Department (IUI) at DFKI. He received a doctor's degree in computer science and a diploma (Msc.) in computational linguistics from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. Daniel has worked in natural language processing, text mining, interface design, and dialogue systems for over 10 years and has been affiliated with DFKI, Xtramind Technologies, and Daimler/Chrysler Research. His current research interests include multimodal interface design, ontology-based question answering, and semantic search engines. At the moment he is working on a situation-aware dialogue shell for semantic access to media and services in the THESEUS research program.

Date:

13th of November 2009

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Sentence Level Event Detection and Coreference Resolution

Martina Naughton

School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin

Abstract

On March 20th 2003, U.S. forces invaded Iraq. It is estimated that over 101,800 Iraqi civilians have been killed to date. However, the U.S. authorities refused to record Iraqi deaths. This estimate was actually derived from a manual survey of published on-line news reports conducted by the Iraq Body Count initiative, a project that established an independent database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq. This is one example of where an automatic Event Analysis system, capable of detecting and counting these deaths, would have been beneficial. Event Analysis is a core Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that focuses on the automatic identification and classification of various event types in text. In this work, we explore supervised and unsupervised learning approaches for automatically performing Event Analysis on news texts. Previous studies viewed events as phrasal or document sized units. In contrast, within this research Event Analysis is examined at a sentence level, a granularity that is favoured by many Information Processing tasks such as Question Answering and Text Summarisation. In this talk, we present Event Analysis as a three-step process: Event Detection; and two forms of Event Coreference Resolution (within-document and cross-document). First, sentences are tagged with an event type (e.g. Die, signifying a death mention), and then sentences that discuss the same event in time are grouped within articles and across related news stories. To perform sentence-level event detection, we use a variety of machine learning and language modelling techniques. Our results show that the techniques presented in this talk are effective event detection solutions, where F1 scores of over 90% are achieved. Clustering-based approaches were explored for within-and cross-document event coreference resolution. Although, this task was found to be more challenging than event detection, our techniques yielded F1 scores of over 80%, when term and other shallow linguistic features were used. Finally, a pipeline error analysis revealed that each step contributed substantially to the overall level of performance achieved, thus justifying our three-step architecture. Once event detection and coreference resolution is performed, sentences describing events can be easily identified. Such functionality could dramatically speed up manual annotation tasks such as those performed by the Iraq Body Count initiative.

Bio: Martina Naughton

In 2004, Martina received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from University College Dublin (UCD). Martina recently completed her Ph.D. at the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics. Her thesis investigated the benefits of computational linguistic and machine learning techniques for sentence level event detection and coreference resolution. In 2007, she spent a semester at the University of Melbourne working with the language technology research group on sentence level event detection task. Martina's primary research interests lie in the application of statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE) related tasks.

Date:

03rd of November 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Grid Database Access, Management and Integration

Salvatore Vadacca

Freelance Consultant

Abstract

Grids encourage and promote the publication, sharing and integration of scientific data, distributed across Virtual Organizations. Scientists and researchers (from bioinformatics, astrophysics, etc.) work on huge, complex and growing datasets. The complexity of data management within a grid environment comes from the distribution, heterogeneity and number of data sources.

Along with coarse-grained services (such as grid storages, replica services and storage resource managers), there is a strong interest on fine-grained services concerning, for instance, grid-database access and management. The talk will explain in detail Grid-Database Management Systems, including database virtualization, data access and integration, security issues, performance issues, and interoperability with existing middleware (Globus, gLite, etc.).

Bio: Salvatore Vadacca

Salvatore Vadacca was born in Galatina, Italy in 1982. He received summa cum laude bachelor and master degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Lecce, Italy in 2003 and 2006, respectively. His research interests include data management; distributed, peer-to-peer, grid and cloud computing; as well as web design and development. From 2003 to 2009, he has been a team member of the GRelC Project.

From 2006 to 2009 he has joined the Scientific Computing and Operations division of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) in Lecce, Italy. Since June 2009, he works as a freelance consultant. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.

Date:

06th of October 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Overview of the Software Research Institute at the Athlone Institute of Technology - Background, past and ongoing research, Innovation role, plans/aspiartions for the future.

Dr. Brian Lee

Bio: Dr. Brian Lee

Dr Brian Lee is director of the SRI and holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin in field of the application of policy management in telecommunication network management. He has worked in telecommunications, primarily with Ericsson, for over twenty years in many areas of technology including fixed and mobile radio and management systems and has extensive experience of systems and software design and development for large telecommunications products. He has held many project and line management positions in a number of different countries and latterly was head of Research for LM Ericsson Ireland. He has also worked as engineering manager in the digital design industry. His research interests include service assurance in telecommunication networks and the application of adaptive software technologies in communication and related fields including service oriented middleware and applications.

Date:

11th of September 2009

Time:

03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations

Marijke Keet

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Abstract

Many types of part-whole relations have been proposed in the literature to aid the conceptual modeller to choose the most appropriate type, but many of those relations lack a formal specification to give clear and unambiguous semantics to them. To remedy this, a formal taxonomy of types of mereological and meronymic part-whole relations is presented that distinguishes between transitive and intransitive relations and the kind of entity types that are related. The demand to use it effectively brings afore new requirements for automated reasoning over a hierarchy of relations. To ensure logically and ontologically correct inferencing over both the class and role hierarchy, the new reasoning service RBox compatibility for Description Logics reasoners is introduced. The proposed combination of formal semantics and the new reasoning service will improve the representation of the application domain when using part-whole relations in conceptual models and ontologies.
Paper: http://www.meteck.org/files/AO07_pw_AK.pdf

Bio: Marijke Keet

Dr.ir.drs. C. Maria Keet (PhD, MSc, MA, BSc(hons)) is currently an Assistant Professor (ricercatore a tempo determinato) at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, where she also obtained her PhD in Computer Science in 2008. She focuses on logic-based knowledge representation, ontology, and Ontology, of biological data and -knowledge, where she concentrates on granularity. She was involved in the TONES project, coordinates the development of the WONDER system for intelligent access to biological data, and has served on several Program Committees of international workshops and conferences. She received an MSc in Microbiology from Wageningen University and Research Centre in 1998, an MA 1st class in Peace & Development Studies from the University of Limerick in 2003, and a BSc(honours) 1st class in IT & Computing from the Open University UK in 2004. Before returning fulltime to academia in 2002, Maria has worked for 3.5 years as systems engineer in the IT industry.
Home page: http://www.meteck.org

Date:

10th of September 2009

Time:

04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Material (Slides):

www.meteck.org/f...

Liferay, portals, portlets and ... semantic information?

Alberto Montero

Software Engineer and Researcher at Liferay

Abstract

Liferay Portal is an open source portal framework solution, whose goal is to provide a web-based gateway for users to locate relevant content and use the applications they commonly need. Out of the box, it includes many applications to create, manage and consume content, such as a CMS, wikis, message boards, blogs and others. But it also delivers tools and libraries to help developers to create their own applications, to allow for easy and fast development of advanced web portals (such as intranets, collaborative webs, or enterprise social networks).

Semantic technologies have been dealing with content for a long time, and a number of applications have emerged to browse and search semantic information. Thus semantic technologies cover one part of the possibilities offered by portals.

This talk is a general presentation of Liferay Portal, and draws several ideas about how semantic technologies can be combined with portals both for contents and applications enhancenment.

Bio: Alberto Montero

Alberto Montero is Telecommunication Engineer by UPM (Politechnical University of Madrid, Spain). He has worked in several companies and research labs on different projects, related to speech recognition, spoken language recognition, voice portals, educative portals and web platforms. Currently he works in Liferay, in the R&D area, researching in new approaches to the development of web platforms.

Date:

04th of September 2009

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI conference room

A comparison of terminological and rule-based policy languages

Prof. Piero A. Bonatti

University of Naples "Federico II"

Abstract

Security and privacy policies commonly consist of declarative constraints over resource usage (data and services). Therefore logic-based representation languages are well-suited as a foundation of policy languages. Indeed, the semantics of standard languages like XACML can be reformulated in a logic-based fashion; moreover, both description logics and logic programming languages (i.e., the two main families of knowledge representation formalisms) have been proposed as policy languages, see KAOS, REI, RT, Cassandra, PeerTrust, and PROTUNE just to name a few approaches.

In this talk we will assess different knowledge representation formalisms as policy languages for security and privacy, taking into account not only the kind of constraints that they can express on resource usage, but also the degree to which various reasoning tasks on policies can be supported. We will conclude that currently rule-based languages are more mature than description logics as far as the general needs of security and privacy policy languages are concerned.

Bio: Prof. Piero A. Bonatti

Professor Piero A. Bonatti is full professor at the University of Naples "Federico II"; since november 2002. He obtained his Laurea and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Maryland at College Park (1991), visiting professor at the Technical University of Vienna (1993), assistant professor at the University of Turin (1994-1998), associate professor at the University of Milan (1998-2002).

His research interests include foundational and applicative aspects of: Knowledge representation and reasoning, Computer security and privacy, Logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning.

He authored about ninety publications on these topics - published on international journals and conference proceedings -, and participated in numerous national and international projects (both EU and USA).

Date:

10th of August 2009

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Synthesizing Ontology Alignment Methods Using the Max-Sum Algorithm

Prof. George VOUROS

University of the Aegean, Greece

Abstract

This talk will addresses the problem of synthesizing ontology alignment methods by maximizing the social welfare within a group of interacting agents: Specifically, each agent is responsible for computing mappings concerning a specific ontology element, using a specific alignment method. Each agent interacts with other agents with whom it shares constraints concerning the validity of the mappings it computes.

Interacting agents form a bipartite factor graph, composed of variable and function nodes, representing alignment decisions and utilities, respectively. Agents need to reach an agreement to the mapping of the ontology elements consistently to the semantics of specifications with respect to their mapping preferences. Addressing the synthesis problem in such a way allows us to use an extension of the max-sum algorithm to generate near-to-optimal solutions to the alignment of ontologies through local decentralized message passing.

Bio: Prof. George VOUROS

Prof. George VOUROS (B.Sc, Ph.D) holds a BSc in Mathematics, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence all from the University of Athens, Greece.

Currently he is a Professor in the University of the Aegean, Greece, and President of the Hellenic Society of Artificial Intelligence. He has done research in the areas of Expert Systems, Knowledge management, Ontologies, Intelligent Collaborative Systems, and Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. His published scientific work includes more than one hundred book chapters, journal and national and international conference papers in the above mentioned themes. He has served as program chair and chair and member of organizing committees of national and international conferences on related topics. Further details concerning his work can be found in http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/lecturers/georgev/

Date:

22nd of June 2009

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

SIOC'ing experiences

Pierre-Antoine Champin

UCD

Abstract

This presentation is about the capture, reuse and sharing of users' experiences. I will first present the framework of Trace Based Systems (TBS), which aims to address these issues. I will then present HeyStaks, a system developed at UCD, enabling people to reuse and share their experiences of searching the Web. Finally, we will discuss how Semantic Web technologies and related researches from DERI, SIOC in particular, can be used in the TBS framework and leverage HeyStaks functionalities.

Bio: Pierre-Antoine Champin

Usually, I am an associate professor in the SILEX research team [1]. During this academic year, I am working as an invited researcher in Clarity [2] at University College Dublin. My research interests focus on knowledge inscriptions, ranging from formal ontologies to modelled interaction traces and annotations on multimedia documents.

[1] Sustaining Interaction and Learning by Experience, LIRIS, Lyon, France. http://liris.cnrs.fr/silex [2] Center for Sensor Web Technologoes, Dublin.

http://www.clarity-center.org/

Date:

28th of May 2009

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Towards a Federation of Sensor Network: The European Project WISEBED

Work by Dr Stefan Fischer, presented by Dr. Dennis Pfisterer

University of Lübeck, Germany

Abstract

The European Union has started a major initiative for a new "future" Internet. Within this context, the so-called "FIRE initiative" aims at creating several testbeds for all kinds of Future Internet technologies. The aim of WISEBED as one of the FIRE projects is to provide a multi-level infrastracture of interconnected testbeds of largescale wireless sensor networks for research purposes, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the aspects of hardware, software, algorithms, and data. This will demonstrate how heterogeneous small-scale devices and testbeds can be brought together to form well-organized, large-scale structures, rather than just some large network; it will allow research not only at a much larger scale, but also in different quality, due to heterogeneous structure and the ability to deal with dynamic scenarios, both in membership and location.

This talk will first give an overview of the European FIRE initiative. Afterwards, it will present the WISEBED approach and first solutions which have been developed. Special emphasis will be put on offerings to be made to external partners which might also be interesting for DERI.

Bio: Work by Dr Stefan Fischer, presented by Dr. Dennis Pfisterer

Dr. Stefan Fischer is a full professor in computer science at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and the director of the Institute for Telematics. He got his diploma degree in "Wirtschaftsinformatik" and his doctoral degree from the University of Mannheim, Germany, in 1992 and 1996, respectively. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Montreal, Canada, he joined the newly founded International University in Germany, one of the first private universities in Germany, as an assistant professor in 1998. In 2001, he became an associate professor in computer science at the Technical University of Braunschweig, where he stayed until 2004, when he joined Lübeck University. His research interest is currently focused on new network and distributed system structures such as ad-hoc and sensor networks. He has (co-)authored about 100 scientific books and articles. Dr Fischer is a member of ACM, IEEE and the German Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).

Date:

27th of May 2009

Time:

11:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

FleGSens: Monitoring Properties and Areas using WSNs

Dr. Dennis Pfisterer

University of Lübeck

Abstract

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an active research area. Due to the restricted hardware environment (in terms of memory, processing power and energy) classical security schemes cannot be applied directly in WSNs. Many new security mechanisms (concerning key distribution and agreement, secure routing, detection of DoS attacks, etc.) were proposed in the academic field, however scarcely applied in practical systems. In the project FleGSens, we develop a surveillance system for critical areas and properties, which incorporates mechanisms to ensure information security. The prototype consists of 200 sensor nodes for monitoring a 500m long land strip. The system is focused on ensuring integrity and authenticity of generated alarms and availability in the presence of an attacker who may even compromise a certain number of sensor nodes. The assumed attacker is a classical Dolev-Yao attacker with some extensions to pay up to the specific possibilities that come with the use of wireless sensor nodes, notably physical access to the nodes.

Bio: Dr. Dennis Pfisterer

Dennis Pfisterer works as a postdoc at the Institute of Telematics, University of Lübeck, Germany (http://www.itm.uni-luebeck.de). After his studies of Information Technology at the University of Applied Sciences in Mannheim, he worked as a research assistant at the European Media Laboratory (http://www.eml.org) in Heidelberg in the area of resource adaptive systems. In 2003, he joined Prof. Fischer's group at the Braunschweig Institute of Technology, and followed him in 2005 to Lübeck to continue his research on sensor networks at the Institute of Telematics. After his PhD, he broadened his research interests and now works on sensor networks in general, their integration with the Future Internet as well as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

Date:

27th of May 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Explorator and an HyperDE based Semantic Wiki

Prof. Daniel Schwabe

PUC-Rio

Abstract

Daniel will present Explorator, a tool for exploring RDF data by direct manipulation. Explorator's visual user interface allows users to explore a semi-structured RDF database to both gain knowledge and answer specific questions about a domain, through browsing, search, and exploration mechanisms.

Also, Daniel will discuss how Model Driven Design philosophy can be applied to synthesize an actual running semantic web application from the specification. He will in particular show HyperDE, an environment that combines Model Driven Design and Domain Specific Languages to enable rapid prototyping of Web applications.

Bio: Prof. Daniel Schwabe

Daniel Schwabe is Professor at the Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio. His main research is focused on "hybrid" information systems - hypermedia applications that are part of a men-machine team that perform tasks. A particular focus of this research has been in model-based (and specifically ontology-driven) application design and development, notably in the context of the Semantic Web. One of the topics investigated is the use of formalized Design Rationale vocabularies, applied to design problems that can be seen as instantiations of some meta-model (e.g., most software development activities).

Date:

18th of May 2009

Time:

04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Progressing your PhD

Dr. Peter Corcoran

NUIG

Abstract

Peter will discuss the following questions: (i) what do I need to do for a PhD?; (ii) the role of mini-Viva & when it should happen; (iii) what is required for the Progress/Transfer report; (iv) what questions to expect in the mini-Viva.

Bio: Dr. Peter Corcoran

Dr. Corcoran is the vice-Dean of Research in the College of Engineering and Informatics.

Date:

15th of May 2009

Time:

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

ESTER, a modular and highly efficient system for combined full-text and ontology search

Ingmare Weber

EPFL

Abstract

I will present ESTER, a modular and highly efficient system for combined full-text and ontology search. ESTER builds on a query engine that supports two basic operations: prefix search and join. Both of these can be implemented very efficiently with a compact index, yet in combination provide powerful querying capabilities.

ESTER supports a natural blend of "semantic" queries ("politicians who had an audience with the pope") with ordinary full-text queries ("ireland galway"). Moreover, the prefix search operation allows for a fully interactive and proactive user interface, which after every keystroke suggests to the user possible semantic interpretations of his or her last query term, and speculatively executes the most likely of these interpretations.

I will give a live demo of ESTER applied to the English Wikipedia, which contains about 3 million documents, combined with the YAGO ontology, which contains about 2.5 million facts.

Finally, I will explain the data structure at the core of ESTER and how it is used to represent the knowledge of the ontology.

Bio: Ingmare Weber

Ingmar received his PhD degree in 2007 from the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, Germany. His dissertation under the supervision of Holger Bast dealt with efficient index structures for the CompleteSearch engine which is now the default search engine for DBLP.

Since 2007 he has been a postdoc in Monika Henzinger's group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests can be broadly labeled as information retrieval and web mining and include social network analysis and sponsored search auctions.

Date:

16th of April 2009

Time:

11:30 AM - 12:15 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Online Presence and Beyond

Milan Stankovic

University Paris Sud-XI, Orsay, France

Abstract

On the Social Web, there are many services that allow us to perceive the presence of others on the Web (Instant Messaging platforms, Microblogging Services, Social Networks…). Different data about presence (status messages, availability statuses, activities) allow us to assemble an image of our friends’ presence. The Social Web today represents a space where we can feel the presence of others. However, the lack of interoperability among services makes it difficult for presence data to flow and reach one’s friends on different services.

In this presentation I present the Online Presence Ontology, a solution for interoperability and data integration in the domain of online presence. Furthermore I present the remaining challenges in the domain of online presence with the focus on faceted presence – a way to appear differently and share different presence data with different groups of contacts in different contexts. In this domain I will present the hypotheses of the ongoing user study and the plans for the future work.

In the second part of the presentation I present some of my ideas for the future of the Social Semantic Web. I follow the viewpoint that “social” is only one aspect of interaction with the Web and I investigate other, adjacent aspects that might inspire future directions of research in the field.

Bio: Milan Stankovic

Milan received his BSc at Univesity of Belgrade, Serbia and is now a MSc student at University Paris Sud-XI, Orsay, France with the scholarship of the French Government. He has been active in Semantic Web research since the enrolment in the GOOD OLD AI Research Network from Belgrade, where he has published several research papers and initiated several research projects in the field of Social and Semantic Web. His research interests include Social Semantic Web and Human Computer Interaction.

http://www.milanstankovic.org/

Date:

08th of April 2009

Time:

03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Foundations of SPARQL Query Optimization

Georg Lausen, joint work with Michael Schmidt, Michael Meier

Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg

Abstract

The SPARQL query language is a recent W3C standard for processing RDF data, a format that has been developed to encode information in a machine-readable way. We investigate the foundations of SPARQL query optimization and (a) provide novel complexity results for the SPARQL evaluation problem, showing that the main source of complexity is operator Optional alone; (b) propose a comprehensive set of algebraic query rewriting rules; (c) present a framework for constraint-based SPARQL optimization based upon the well-known chase procedure for Conjunctive Query minimization. Our results are of immediate practical interest and might empower any SPARQL query optimizer.

Bio: Georg Lausen, joint work with Michael Schmidt and Michael Meier

Prof. Dr. Georg Lausen is Head of the Databases and Information Systems Group at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg

Date:

02nd of March 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

The Role of the Ocean in Climate Change: Enabling Technologies to Address Key Scientific Issues

Dr. Brian Ward

National University of Ireland, Galway

Abstract

Greenhouse gases (GHG) are released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuel for the production of electricity, the provision of transportation, and agricultural activities. Although a significant proportion of the anthropogenic GHGs remain in the atmosphere, the remainder is absorbed by the terrestrial and oceanic sinks. While scientists have already been able to provide initial quantitative estimates of ocean-atmosphere sources and sinks, the uncertainties are excessively large. Improving global budgets therefore requires establishing the dependence of gas exchange on the key processes on both sides of the air-sea interface.

The ocean microlayer comprises the upper 1 mm where the molecular processes overcome turbulence due to viscous effects. Direct measurement of this region of the ocean requires specialised sensors with high spatial and temporal resolution. It also requires a platform on which these sensors can be mounted, and which can minimise the disturbance on the flow. Atmospheric turbulent fluxes can be directly quantified using the eddy covariance method, which relies on high-frequency measurements of the fluctuations of vertical wind velocity and gas concentration. The challenge is to relate the oceanic processes responsible for gas transfer to the measured atmospheric fluxes.

These scientific problems have motivated the development of a diamond-coated thermometer with sub-millisecond, sub-millimetre, and sub-millikelvin resolutions. The Air-Sea Interaction Profiler (ASIP) is an autonomous profiling platform which can repeatedly transport a suite of sensors within the upper 10 m of the ocean to the surface. The implementation of photoacoustic spectroscopy for the measurement of atmospheric gas concentrations at high frequency and high sensitivity will extend measurements of GHGs beyond the ubiquitous carbon dioxide. The scientific motivation and the instrumentation will be described in this seminar.

Bio: Dr. Brian Ward

Dr. Brian Ward, National University of Ireland, Galway, School of Physics, University Road, Galway, Ireland. Tel.: +353.91.493029 Fax: +353.91.494584 E-mail: bward@nuigalway.ie

Graduated with a B.Sc. in Applied Physics (NUIG) and a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography (NUIG, 1998). Marie Curie Fellow at the Geophysical Institute/Nansen Centre (Bergen, Norway) from 1999 to 2000. Postdoctoral Fellow at the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, (Miami FL, USA) 2001. Research scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole MA, USA) 2002 to 2006. Assistant professor at Old Dominion University (Norfolk VA, USA) 2006 to December 2007. Current position: Lecturer in School of

Physics, NUIG, and Adjunct Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Physical Oceanography Department).

Date:

24th of February 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

What Daedalus told Darwin, recognizing patterns in social nets & semantic webs

Zann Gill

ICT Center of Excellence (NICTA)

Abstract

Researchers have analyzed how social networks operate, from small organizations to nations and networks of people connected by similar values and objectives. But insufficient attention has been paid to harnessing social networks for cross-disciplinary, collaborative problem-solving. 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of his publication of Origin of Species. The theory of evolution is seen by many as the greatest theoretical breakthrough of all time. Zann Gill will introduce findings that call for a more complete interpretation of Darwin's theory (Stephen Jay Gould thought "Darwinism" misrepresented Darwin) and argue that this more complete interpretation of Darwin's theory would drive sustainable development and offer a model for seeding and evolving "innovation networks" to develop smart systems for eco-sustainability at the intersection of ICT and green tech.

Bio: Zann Gill

Zann Gill (M. Arch. Harvard) started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation. Her entry to the international competition Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government, tied with Matsushita Corp. for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki. She proposed a networked system of sixteen initiatives - a framework comprised of diverse interlinked components for urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. More recently at NASA she developed program plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a think tank BEACON and NASA University. She founded DESYN lab (http://desyn.com) to apply her method to "raise collaborative IQ" (http://www.desyn.com/c-iq.html) and (http://www.zanngill.com/3ciq.html) and is currently working with Australia's ICT Center of Excellence (NICTA) on a "smart systems - eco-cities" initiative.

Date:

23rd of February 2009

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

Faceted Browsing and Knowledge Discovery for the Open Web and Multimedia Semantics

Orri Erling, Yrjänä Rankka

OpenLink Software

Abstract

The talk describes how we use Virtuoso for providing faceted browsing on a highly heterogenous corpus of web crawls, linked data and multimedia metadata. We demonstrate interactive browsing against the billion triples challenge data set, 1.1bn triples, including Dbpedia, Freebase and much more. The system begins with full text search and then uses facets for further drill down and discovery. Multimedia is supported at the display end, for instance with maps and timelines. On the database side, we present algorithms for partial query evaluation, allowing returning results in predictable time even when the data volume and distribution is unpredictable. These work on arbitrarily complex queries, also involving aggregation and inference.

Bio: Orri Erling and Yrjänä Rankka

Orri Erling is the Program Manager of Virtuoso at OpenLink Software. Erling is the main designer and developer of the Virtuoso engine, including kernel, clustering and SQL optimization. Yrjänä Rankka is a Developer in Virtuoso team at OpenLink Software currently working on cluster QA, ODS application suite and UI.

Date:

21st of January 2009

Time:

02:30 PM - 03:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI conference room

Tagcrumbs.com - From Idea to Product Launch

Cornelius Rabsch

Research Intern at DERI

Abstract

In August 2008 I co-founded the Internet startup Tagcrumbs Ltd while studying at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Tagcrumbs.com provides a platform to collect, discover & share places worth remembering, we like to call it "social placemarking". The official launch will be in the next weeks and the presentation will be about the first experiences of starting up and how to build a company with a sustainable business concept from a rough idea. Furthermore I will describe who is behind Tagcrumbs Ltd followed by a few startup essentials. For DERI members interested in social software, I show what kind of semantics Tagcrumbs exposes and why openness is an essential part of the business strategy. Relevant topics include microformats, tagging, Geonames, APIs and Creative Commons. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and Internet startups, I welcome you to this presentation and discussions on how Tagcrumbs can connect the world with the web. With the Mobile Internet in its infancy these are exciting times with challenging opportunities in the location-based services sector. Topics left out are our location-aware iPhone application, scalable infrastructures with Amazon Web Services ("the server-less Internet startup"), writing a business plan, financing issues ("bootstrapping") or I18n. I am here at DERI for some more months to finish my master thesis and for persons interested in more details and knowledge exchange, I can organize a gathering in a pub of your choice.

Bio: Cornelius Rabsch

Cornelius Rabsch is currently writing his final thesis at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland in Galway in the Semantic Web area. He is enrolled for Business Information Technology at the University of Mannheim in Germany since Sep 2003. His interest are on entrepreneurship, internet technologies and all things digital. Together with two co-founders he started Tagcrumbs, a social placemarking Internet company.

Date:

16th of January 2009

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

RKBExplorer.com: Anatomy of a Semantic Web Application

Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard

University of Southampton, UK

Abstract

As part of the ReSIST Project [1], we have developed a set of knowledge bases and the infrastructure that surrounds them to support all aspects of the project work and endeavour, using Semantic Web technologies throughout. The system includes more than 20 individual knowledge bases, many containing over 10M RDF triples, along with knowledge capture utilities, knowledge publishing facilities, and the infrastructure required to enable the interoperation of these resources to give users a unified view of the system as whole [2]. We present an overview of the system, and discuss certain aspects in more detail, particularly the components which deal with multiple URI references to the same resources.

[1] "ReSIST: Resilience for Survivability in IST" EU-funded Network of Excellence, http://www.resist-noe.org/

[2] RKB Explorer Application, http://www.rkbexplorer.com/explorer/

Bio: Hugh Glaser and Ian Millard

Hugh Glaser is a Reader in Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, researching in Semantic Web Technologies. He was heavily involved in the development of the CS AKTiveSpace application. Prior to this he worked in Parallel and Distributed Computing and involved in the early work on pure Functional Programming languages.

Ian Millard is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. As part of the ReSIST project, he has been working on developing the RKBExplorer Application and associated infrastructure. Previous to this, his PhD research focussed on the application of Semantic Web Technologies in Pervasive Computing environments to provide assistive and proactive services for their users.

Date:

16th of December 2008

Time:

03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine)

Tim Clark

Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical

Abstract

SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is a Web-based collaborative program that aims to organize and annotate scientific knowledge about Alzheimer disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Its goal is to facilitate the formation, development and testing of hypotheses about the disease. The ultimate goal of this project is to create tools and resources to manage the evolving universe of data and information about AD in such a way that researchers can easily comprehend their larger context ("what hypothesis does this support or contradict?"), compare and contrast hypotheses ("where do these two hypotheses agree and disagree?"), identify unanswered questions and synthesize concepts and data into ever more comprehensive and useful hypotheses and treatment targets for this disease.

Bio: Tim Clark

Tim Clark was one of the early developers of NCBI GenBank, and beginning in 1994 founded the highly innovative program in Informatics at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he was Vice President of Informatics. From 2002-2003 he chaired the consortium responsible for developing the LSID interoperability specification. In 2003 he was a co-recipient of the Bio-IT World Grand Prize for Best Practices in Pharmaceutical Informatics. He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins, and is a founding Editorial Board member of the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics. He currently directs the MIND Center for Interdisciplinary Informatics, and holds appointments as a Computer Scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Neurology at the Harvard Medical School.

Date:

03rd of December 2008

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI Conference Room

The Social Semantic Web

Dr. John Breslin

of Engineering and Informatics, National University of Ireland, Galway

Abstract

The Social Web - social networking services, blogs and wikis - has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. As more social websites form around the connections between people and their objects of interest, more intuitive methods are needed for representing and navigating the content in these sites. Also, to better enable user access to multiple sites, interoperability among social websites is required. This talk will describe the semantic technologies that can be used to interconnect both people and objects on the Social Web.

Bio: Dr. John Breslin

John Breslin, BE (Electronics), PhD, MIET - http://www.johnbreslin.org/ John Breslin is a lecturer at the Department of Electronic Engineering in the College of Engineering and Informatics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also an associate researcher and leader of the Social Software Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway, the world’s largest Semantic Web research institute. He is the founder of the SIOC project, which aims to interlink online community sites using semantic technologies, and which has been deployed in over 50 applications including Yahoo! SearchMonkey. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006 for the Irish community website boards.ie, which he co-founded in 2000.

Date:

27th of November 2008

Time:

06:15 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Linked data, search engine query logs, and the URI identity crisis

Harry Halpin

Collaborative and Communicating Systems, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract

The Semantic Web promises a world of structured information to ordinary users, allowing them to deduce and understand things that the current unstructured hypertext Web does not allow. However, what types of information on the Semantic Web are ordinary "pre-semantic" users actually looking for? We present preliminary results and analysis of these aspects of the Semantic Web by running a large query log from a major search engine against the Linked Data Web. Furthermore, we conjecture on how the use of hypertext search engines can be used to solve one of the deepest problems of the Semantic Web, the "Identity Crisis": Given a URI, how can multiple agents interoperably come up with a meaning? Furthermore, given an intended meaning, how can an agent discover a URI?

Bio: Harry Halpin

Harry Halpin is a researcher and postgraduate student of Henry S. Thompson and Andy Clark at the University of Edinburgh. He is interested in the intersection of philosophy and the Web. In particular, what exactly are the secrets to the success of the Web and what lessons does this hold for computing in general, and especially artificial intelligence? In his current work Harry is analyzing both the underlying architecture of the Web using notions from information theory, type theory, the philosophy of computation. As a side interest, Harry is also interested in how we can use machine-learning and natural language processing to make the massive amount of text on the Web easier to use, in particular through automatic ontology creation. This application comes from his interest in narrative analysis, which he did his MSc. thesis in. Harry Halpin can usually be found in Edinburgh, but he has been known to make guest appearances in New York City and the forests of North Carolina.

Date:

27th of November 2008

Time:

02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Hypermedia is dead - long live linked multimedia!

Michael Hausenblas

Joanneum Research Forschungsges. mbH

Abstract

While we are literally swamped with multimedia content, it is still a challenge to semantically process it. Only recently, linked data has proven to be one of the first real-world manifestations of the Web of Data - to date mainly regarding textual resources. In this talk we will shortly review multimedia semantics activities in the research community and within W3C. We will report on multimedia interlinking challenges, demonstrate recent work in this realm and discuss issues regarding the design of scalable yet smart multimedia Web applications. Finally, a proposal for a research agenda in multimedia semantics along with upcoming activities is presented.

Bio: Michael Hausenblas

Michael is a senior researcher at JOANNEUM RESEARCH, an applied research company in Austria. He is working in the area of multimedia semantics utilising Web of Data technologies in a couple of national and international (EU) projects. Within W3C Michael has been active in the Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group (2006/2007), the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the RDFa Task Force (since 2006), and is about to participate in the W3C Video on the Web activity. Michael and his team have contributed to the linked data community project by publishing a dataset, working on discovery issues (voiD), proposing "User Contributed Interlinking" and addressing issues with multimedia interlinking. Currently, Michael is finalising his PhD.

Date:

08th of September 2008

Time:

02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Material (Slides):

sw-app.org/prese...

ResIn: A Combination of Result Caching and Index Pruning for High-performance Web Search Engines

Gleb Skobeltsyn

Abstract

Results caching is an efficient technique for reducing the query processing load, hence it is commonly used in real search engines. This technique, however, bounds the maximum hit rate due to the large fraction of singleton queries, which is an important limitation. In this paper we propose ResIn - an architecture that uses a combination of results caching and index pruning to overcome this limitation. We argue that results caching is an inexpensive and efficient way to reduce the query processing load and show that it is cheaper to implement compared to a pruned index. At the same time, we show that index pruning performance is fundamentally affected by the changes in the query traffic that the results cache induces. We experiment with real query logs and a large document collection, and show that the combination of both techniques enables efficient reduction of the query processing costs and thus is practical to use in Web search engines.

Bio: Gleb Skobeltsyn

Gleb Skobeltsyn is an assistant and a Ph.D. student in the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. His research interests include indexing and caching in P2P networks, query-log analysis and distributed data management. He obtained M.Sc (2002) and B.Sc (2000) degrees from the Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University (Spb STU), Russia. He finished the Predoctoral School in Computer and Communication Sciences in EPFL in 2003. Currently he is working towards his PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Karl Aberer. Gleb is a co-organizer of the workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval collocated with CIKM'08.

Date:

29th of August 2008

Time:

04:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Bounded Treewidth as a Key to Efficient Computation

Reinhard Pichler

TU Vienna

Abstract

Many computationally hard problems become tractable if some problem parameter is fixed. In this talk, we discuss some problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning, which become tractable if the input structures have bounded treewidth. The mathematical tool for proving these tractability results is Courcelle's Theorem which states that if some property of finite structures is expressible by a Monadic Second Order (MSO, for short) sentence then this property is decidable in linear time for structures whose treewidth is bounded by a fixed constant. Clearly, these theoretical tractability results as such do not immediately yield practically efficient algorithms. However, we have recently proposed monadic datalog (i.e., datalog where all intensional predicate symbols are unary) as a practical tool for devising efficient algorithms in situations where the tractability has been established via Courcelle's Theorem. Above all, we proved that if some property of finite structures is expressible in MSO then this property can also be expressed by means of a monadic datalog program over the structure plus the tree decomposition. Moreover, we showed that this monadic datalog approach is also well suited for constructing new, efficient algorithms.

Bio: Reinhard Pichler

Prof. Reinhard Pichler Institute of Information Systems Database and Artificial Intelligence Group 184/2 TU Wien. Reinhard Pichler got a master's degree from the University of Innsbruck (Mag.rer.nat. in Mathematics, 1991), another master's degree from the University of London (MSc in Mathematical Computation, 1992, at the QMW College), and a PhD from the Vienna University of Technology (Dr.techn. in Computer Science, 2000). In May 2001, he received his "habilitation" in Theoretical Computer Science. From 1992 to 2005, he worked at the Program and Systems Development Department of the Siemens AG Österreich. Since July 2005, he has been a full professor at the Information Systems Institute of the Vienna University of Technology.

Date:

20th of August 2008

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI, Conference Room

Material (Slides):

fileadmin/docume...

Hyperequivalence in Logic Programming

Stefan Woltran

TU Vienna

Abstract

The problem of deciding equivalence between logic programs has received substantial attention in the research community in the past several years. In its general form, this problem can be stated as follows: Let C be a class of logic programs (containing the empty program). Then, programs P and Q are said to be equivalent with respect to class C, if for every program R in C, P+R and Q+R provide the same output. As the empty program is always assumed to be in C, equivalence with respect to C implies the standard nonmonotonic equivalence of programs (two programs are nonmonotonically equivalent if they have the same output). Therefore, one refers to stronger versions of equivalence collectively as hyperequivalence. Understanding hyperequivalence is fundamental for the development of modular logic programs and knowledge bases as well as for query optimization and program rewriting methods. The problem is non-trivial due to the nonmonotonic nature of all common semantics. In this talk, we highlight recent results from the literature which deal with two of the main semantics for logic programming, the supported model and the stable model semantics. We present model-theoretic characterizations for hyperequivalence and discuss the complexity of deciding whether two programs are hyperequivalent.

Bio: Stefan Woltran

Dr. Stefan Woltran Institute of Information Systems Database and Artificial Intelligence Group 184/2 TU Wien. Stefan Woltran received his diploma in Computer Science at the Vienna Univ. of Technology in 2001. In 2003 he received his PhD in Computer Science. From July 2001 to May 2007 he was working as a project research assistant in the Knowledge-Based Systems Group which is lead by Prof. Eiter on projects funded by the Austrian Research Fund (FWF). Since June 2007, Stefan Woltran is an assistant professor at the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group of Vienna Univ. of Technology which is lead by Prof. Gottlob.

Date:

19th of August 2008

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in DERI, Conference Room

Material (Slides):

fileadmin/docume...

Social Music Meets the Semantic Web

Alexandre Passant

LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne

Abstract

In this presentation, it will be shown how elements of the Social Semantic Web (FOAF / SIOC / MOAT / Linked Open Data) can be used in the context of music-related services and how they can provide new ways for music recommendation.

Date:

31st of July 2008

Time:

12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Adaptive Hypermedia for e-Learning

Vatcharaporn Esichaikul

Asian Institute of Technology

Abstract

e-Learning systems are widely used in the academic community because of its beauty - the students can learn from anywhere, and anytime. However, most e-Learning systems just imitate a web-based learning, without an ability to adapt based on student's prior knowledge/behavior. Therefore, it is a challenge to make e-Learning systems to be more “adaptive.” The talk will present a proposed e-Learning system equipped with major adaptive features. The two main components for developing adaptive e-Learning system are a student modeling and an adaptive hypermedia. The student modeling part is based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory. For the adaptive hypermedia part, the proposed system applies four techniques from adaptive navigation support technology: direct guidance, link sorting, link hiding, and link annotation.

Date:

18th of July 2008

Time:

11:30 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Exploiting Organisational Information for Service Coordination in Multiagent Systems

Dr. Alberto Fernandez

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Abstract

Service-Oriented Computing and Agent Technology are nowadays two of the most active research fields in distributed and open systems. However, when trying to bridge the two worlds, it becomes apparent that the interaction-centric approach of multiagent systems may affect the way services are modelled and enacted, and vice versa. We claim that organisational models that underlie multiagent interactions are crucial in order to take advantage of this interrelation. In this talk, we will present an approach for modelling organisational structures in service-oriented multiagent systems, and show how it affects semantic service descriptions. We also present approaches to service matchmaking as well as to service composition, capable of exploiting organisational information in service descriptions. In both cases, we prove experimentally the validity of our approach.

Bio: Dr. Alberto Fernandez

Alberto Fernandez is an associate professor at university Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain), where he is member of the Artificial Intelligence Group and the Centre for Intelligent Information Technologies (CETINIA). He obtained his PhD in 2007. His research interests include coordination in multiagent systems, semantic Web reasoning, semantic Web services discovery and ontology alignment.

Date:

16th of July 2008

Time:

02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Interoperability in Semantic Distributed Systems

Jérôme Euzenat

INRIA Rhône-Alpes

Abstract

Semantic distributed systems take advantage of formally expressed knowledge distributed in a network without centralising any of this knowledge. They occur in various contexts such as semantic peer-to-peer systems or semantic social networks. In this talk we will present and abstraction of this kind of systems and consider some open problems of these systems. This include how to find relations between peers from knowledge, how to transfer knowledge appropriately from peer to peers, and how to be sure that I can take the most out of my network. All these problems depend on two main features of these systems: their heterogeneity (each node can describe knowledge differently) and locality (each node communicates only with its neighbours). In addition we will describe a piece of infrastructure based on our Alignment server.

Bio: Jérôme Euzenat

Jérôme Euzenat is a senior research scientist at INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes. He leads the Exmo team investigating the exchange of formal knowledge mediated by computers. He is particularly interested in the relationships between representations including abstraction, granularity, versioning and transforming representations. He holds a PhD and habilitation in computer science, both from Grenoble 1 University. For more information, please check his homepage at: http://www.inrialpes.fr/exmo/people/euzenat/

Date:

04th of July 2008

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

The software supply chain in the enterprise domain

Douwe Postmus

University of Groningen

Date:

27th of June 2008

Time:

02:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Reactive and Pro-active Behavior in Moving Objects Databases

Peter Scheuermann

Nothwestern University

Abstract

Context-aware systems have the ability to react and adapt to the evolution of the environment, which is often the result of changes in the values of various correlated attributes. Based on these changes reactive systems typically take corrective actions, e.g., they adjust parameters in order to maintain the desired specifications of the system’s state. Pro-active systems, on the other hand, may change the mode of interaction with the environment as well as the desired goals of the system. In this talk, we describe our ECA2 paradigm for describing triggers that capture the reactive behaviour with proactive impact in databases that manage distributed and continuously changing data. In particular, we illustrate our concepts by focusing on a number of dynamic topological predicates that need to be monitored in moving objects databases, namely moving-along and moving-towards. We introduce the concept of meta-triggers that can be used to minimize the communication overhead and ensure behavioural correctness in distributed settings. Finally, we outline a high-level language that can be used to describe the dynamics of the problem domain, specify triggers under the ECA2 paradigm and do hypothetical reasoning.

Bio: Peter Scheuermann

Prof Scheuermann is a faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Nothwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. He has held visiting appointments at ETHZ in Zurich, Free University in Amsterdan and Technical University Berlin. He has been Program Manager at NSF and General Chair for SIGMOD ‘98 ‘06 and for ER ‘03. His main research interests are in mobile computing, databases, data mining and sensor networks. Prof Scheuermann is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Date:

24th of June 2008

Time:

01:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Controlled Multi-Path Routing for Prolonging Lifetime in Sensor Networks

Peter Scheuermann

Northwestern University

Abstract

We address the problem of developing an energy-efficient multi-routing approach that aims at extending the lifetime of a wireless sensor network while ensuring soft guarantees regarding the delivery time of the packets. Our approach is based on a special kind of spline curves, called Bezier curves, which lend themselves to easy algebraic parameterization and have the important property of affine invariance. We show that by using Bezier curves we achieve a more effective load balancing, by having a larger fraction of the nodes in the vicinities of the source and sink participate in the multipaths We examine several route alternating policies and further show how we can associate the concept of a streaming pipe with each Bezier curve to further balance the load. We present the results of simulation results that show that our method outperforms significantly the k-shortest paths approach based on trajectory-forwarding. We also discuss how our approach can be extended to prodcuce alternating multiple triobutaries and deltas when processing queries with respect to a given geographic area.

Date:

16th of June 2008

Time:

01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

A Tale of Two Projects -- EVERGROW and HUMINET

Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract

EVERGROW, a small integrated project in the 6th Framework of the EC, concluding in 2007, promised to make the world a better place by better mapping and understanding the growth of the Internet along with its distributed applications, such as Google, Akamai, BitTorrent and various forms of distributed storage. We were reasonably successful in creating some new methods of network topology measurement and extracting some surprising new features and new opportunities from our observations. We learned a few lessons about how scientists from disciplines as distant as communications, theoretical physics, and software engineering can (and sometimes can't) work together. And it was enormously enjoyable. HUMINET is just a proposal at the moment, to roughly the same area of funding support. It focuses on social networks, and takes a broader approach to what linkages will matter, and to the sort of applications and social spaces that will be of importance in the next decade. While the Internet just seems to grow and grow, social networks appear lumpier, with fads and fashions causing growth, death and replacement. These are much more complex processes to understand. The scientific approach of aggregated measurement and virtual observatories will be even more important, as snapshots of novel activities will not be sufficient to project the future.

Bio: Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick

Scott Kirkpatrick, a physicist by training, has spent 25+ years at IBM research doing science and managing projects in advanced technology for personal computing. Since 2000, he has been professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is interested in big complicated things that may be influenced by a few simple ideas, like the Internet, born-digital information, and embedded intelligence.

Date:

26th of May 2008

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Logical foundations of (e)RDF(S): Complexity and reasoning

Jos de Bruijn

University of Bozen/Bolzano

Abstract

An important open question in the semantic Web is the precise relationship between the RDF(S) semantics and the semantics of standard knowledge representation formalisms such as logic programming and description logics. In this paper we address this issue by considering embeddings of RDF and RDFS in logic. Using these embeddings, combined with existing results about various fragments of logic, we establish several novel complexity results. The embeddings we consider show how techniques from deductive databases and description logics can be used for reasoning with RDF(S). Finally, we consider querying RDF graphs and establish the data complexity of conjunctive querying for the various RDF entailment regimes.

Bio: Jos de Bruijn

Dr. Jos de Bruijn is an assistant professor in the KRDB group, at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. His research interests include the application of (combinations of) logics and logic programming to Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web. Of special interest are combinations of rules with RDF and OWL. He is currently involved in the Rule Interchange Format working group, in which his personal goal is to make sure the working group produces a usable Semantic Web rules language; specifically, to make sure the language is compatible with RDF and OWL. He is working on a new version of the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), in which the semantic Web languages RDF and OWL are taken more seriously; RDF and OWL ontologies can be used for defining terminologies of Web service description. For more information on his recent and older activities, please see his Curriculum Vitae at http://www.debruijn.net/vitae.html.

Date:

23rd of May 2008

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Material (Slides):

fileadmin/docume...

The Virtuoso RDF triplestore, cloud computing edition

Orri Erling, Yrjänä Rankka

OpenLink Software

Abstract

The talk will address the following topics:

Adaptation of a relational platform for RDF. This topic includes RDF oriented data types, key compression, bitmap indices and cost model adaptation.
Clustered Database. This topic addresses the changes for query execution logic that are needed for dealing with latency in a distributed memoory multiprocessor situation.
SPARQL and Inference Requirements. This topic addresses embedding basic backward chaining inference in the SQL/SPARQL execution model, supporting subclasses, subproperties and owl:SameAs. We also discuss the implications of this for execution in a distributed memory multiprocessor situation.
Vision for Architecture. We begin with identifying the key issues met thus far, these being thread synchronization, message latency and storage density. We look at future use cases for ad hoc search, analytics and meshups on a web scale linked data universe. We derive inference, query planning and execution parallelizing requirements and sketch the present work for addressing these issues. We discuss more inferencing, better parallel execution, better query execution planning.

Bio: Orri Erling and Yrjänä Rankka

Orri Erling is the Program Manager of Virtuoso at OpenLink Software.
Erling is the main designer and developer of the Virtuoso engine, including kernel, clustering and SQL optimization.

Yrjänä Rankka is a Developer in Virtuoso team at OpenLink Software currently working on cluster QA, ODS application suite and UI.

Date:

16th of May 2008

Time:

02:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

The End of the Computing Era: Hephaestus meets The Olympians

Michael Brodie

Verizon Communications

Abstract

Our Digital World is becoming increasingly real (and vice versa), is being extended to include the physical world, and is growing in size, scope, and significance apparently on its own trajectory. The elimination of the ancient boundaries of time, space, location, and organizational structure appear to be unleashing social and other forces that threaten to disrupt real and automated systems replacing them with organically evolving digital ecosystems. Yet at the threshold of these amazing changes do we have the tools to understand, design, or harness these changes for safety, improvement, innovation, and economic growth? In ancient times, Hephaestus, the Greek god of technology, devised cunning machines with which to right transgressions only to find that his machines aggravated problems that were beyond his understanding. This talk will briey review the amazing growth of the Web and of our increasingly digital world as indicators of two fundamental shifts. We will first look at the End of the Computing Era and the emergence of the Problem Solving Era in which the problem owners attempt to solve problems with increasing realism and complexity aided by technology - not vice versa. Second, we will examine the emergence of a fundamentally more flexible, adaptive, and dynamic computing, Computer Science 2.0, and how it might serve the next generation of problem solving with its pillars of semantic technologies, service-oriented computing, and the semantic web.

Bio: Michael Brodie

Dr. Michael L. Brodie holds a PhD in Databases from the University of Toronto. Dr. Michael L. Brodie has an active interest in the Semantic Web, Service-Oriented Computing, information security, interoperability, information systems, databases, infrastructure and application architectures, legacy systems, business processes, and the evaluation and deployment of advanced IT solutions. Dr. Michael L. Brodie has authored over 150 books, chapters, journal articles, and conference papers. He has presented keynote talks, invited lectures, and short courses in over thirty countries. Dr. Michael L. Brodie is a member of the United States of America National Academies Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and other National Goals, co-chaired by Dr. Charles Vest, president emeritus of MIT and Dr. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. He is an Adjunct Professor, National University of Ireland, Galway (2006-present). He is on several research and industrial advisory boards: The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (2007-present), Semantic Technology Institutes International (2007-present), School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2001-present); Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland (2003-present); European Union's Information Society Technologies 5th, 6th, and 7th Framework Programmes (2003-present); Forrester Research, Inc. (2006-present); VLDB (Very Large Databases) Endowment (1992 - 2004); editorial boards of several research journals; advisory boards of several European and Asian research projects. Dr.
Michael L. Brodie is Assistant Scout Master in Troop63 Sudbury, MA (Boy Scouts of America) and on the Advisory Board of the Chamberlain Art Studios, Marsh eld, MA. See http://www.michaelbrodie.com for more details.

Date:

16th of May 2008

Time:

01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Room IT204, Department of Information Technology

Advanced Query Processing in P2P Database Systems: Challenges & Solutions

Kai-Uwe Sattler

Technical University of Ilmenau

Abstract

Over the past years P2P data management systems have evolved to adopt features for processing complex queries. However, the inherent characteristics of large-scale P2P systems require special techniques which go beyond classical query processing strategies known from distributed databases. In this talk we discuss these challenges and present ideas and solutions both for unstructured Peer Data Management Systems as well as for DHT-based P2P databases. We focus on two

issues: (1) approximate query processing addressing the problems of heterogeneity and inexact mappings by relaxing exactness and completeness expectations and (2) estimation of completeness of query answers.

Bio: Kai-Uwe Sattler

Kai-Uwe Sattler leads the Database and Information Systems group at the Faculty of Computer Science and Automation of the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany. He received his Diploma (M.Sc.) in Computer Science from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. In 1998, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same university.
From 1998 to September 2003 he was a member of the Database research group at the University of Magdeburg. From October 2001 until March 2002, he worked as a visiting assistant professor at the UC Davis.
In June 2003, he received his Habilitation (venia legendi) in Computer Science from the University of Magdeburg. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Automation of the TU Ilmenau in October 2003 as Professor.

Date:

10th of April 2008

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Material (Slides):

fileadmin/docume...

Bootstrapping the Semantic Web of Social Online Communities

Sergio Fernández

Abstract

Mining and searching the social web is hardly possible without a noteworthy amount of data available in an interoperable format. This talk enumerates and compares several techniques which can be applied to obtain large quantities of RDF data describing social web sites.

Advantages, drawbacks and potential issues of each of these methods are discussed. Practical experimentation permits us to illustrate and to discuss the convenience of each approach.

Date:

09th of April 2008

Time:

12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

The TEC Centre Cork and the Re-Mote Testbed Framework

Donna Griffin, Rosta Spinar

Technologies for Embedded Computing Centre (TEC-Centre), Cork Institute of Technology

Abstract

Donna will provide a presentation on the TEC-Centre. As part of the activities conducted in the TEC-Centre she will outline the centres GAINe programme which provides an industry lead educational facility for undergraduate students. Within GAINe the summer internship programme objectives will be outlined – which is essentially to create the beginnings of Irelands Sensor Network through possible collaboration with DERI, in NUIG. A discussion on a suitable middleware platform will form part of this discussion.

Rosta will present and demonstrate his current work on the Re-Mote Testbed Framework. The framework was originally developed at DIKU Copenhagen under the supervision of Philippe Bonnet. In May 2007 CIT joined the current development of the framework and continue the collaboration with DIKU since then. Those interested in the framework, visit our project website http://code.google.com/p/remote-testbed/ for learning more about the project and its future plans.

Bio: Donna Griffin and Rosta Spinar

Donna Griffin graduated with a BSc. in Software Development and Computer Networking and a Masters in Engineering (by research) from Cork Institute of Technology (CIT), Ireland in 2002 and 2004 respectively. In 2007 she completed her PhD in the area of telecommunications with an emphasis on service provisioning for Next Generation mobile networks. At present she is a Post Doctorate researcher in the Technologies for Embedded Computing Centre (TEC-Centre) in Cork Institute of Technology. Her current position is a mixture of applied and fundamental research activities, with her fundamental research interests lying in the area of middleware and model driven engineering techniques with a special emphasis on wireless sensor network management.

Rosta Spinar graduated with a Masters in Engineering (MEng) in the field of Measurement and Instrumentation from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Prague in 2004. Upon completion of his MEng degree he has being pursuing a PhD degree in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in the Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems (C-AWS) at Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland. In parallel with his research studies he is also working as a Research Engineer in C-AWS where he is currently responsible for the deployment and development of the C-AWS WSN test bed and is also involved in the design activities for a protocol stack for WSN. Apart from these activities, he is also involved in the development of a Wi-Fi tag for localization purposes.

Date:

03rd of April 2008

Time:

02:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Conference Room

Semantic social software: the Semantic Web for consumers

Nova Spivack

Founder and CEO, Radar Networks (Twine)

Bio: Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Radar Networks, is one of the leading voices of the emerging Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. Nova founded Radar Networks to develop the next evolution of social software, based on the Semantic Web. In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb, one of the first Internet companies. EarthWeb went public in 1998 and resulted in the Nasdaq's largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of techology IPOs. Prior to EarthWeb, Nova worked at artificial intelligence and supercomputing ventures including Individual Inc., Xerox/Kurzweil and Thinking Machines. Nova is also the founder of Lucid Ventures, an early-stage incubator that originated the technologies that are now part of Radar Networks. Nova is a co-founder of the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN), a network of several hundred technology innovators and business leaders who meet monthly in the Bay Area. Nova also worked with SRI and Sarnoff Laboratories at the end of the 90s to helped to co-found nVention, SRI’s in-house technology incubator. Nova’s weblog, Minding the Planet, focuses on Web 3.0 and other emerging science and technology topics.

Date:

05th of March 2008

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

The Web Developer and the Semantic Web: Semantic Web Developer?

Jonathan Hendler

Abstract

The Semantic Web has been a struggling relationship I've had for 9 years, starting when I sent an email to James Hendler, asking him if I was related. He said no.

The Semantic Web and I are in a strange relationship; we aren't separated, we aren't married, and we've been dating so long people think we ought to have had children by now. Needless to say, there are skeptics about us, and my peers still raise eyebrows when I say we are living together.

I present the perspectives of Developer from outside a large development shop, outside academia and government grants and initiatives, outside the military and pharmaceutical companies (whom one would assume wield enough resources to fund thorough initiatives ). I'm but a part of the mangy masses of web developers pining for something undeniably fun and useful. The assumption is that I might be ignorant of this or that, but certainly not more ignorant than average, and therefore my perspective is simply a broad and personal perspective on the state of Semantic Web.

Bio: Jonathan Hendler

Jonathan Hendler has 13 years of industry experience, and has worked through many sectors of computer services from image editing, video editing, animation, and web development. Originally from the state of Maine, he holds a degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in Boston, where he concentrated on databases and did a directed study in knowledge bases.

One of his side projects is an experimental Drupal module called "Semantic Search". The module combines two powerful technologies:

faceted search interfaces, and the Semantic Web. The module allows existing Drupal websites to quickly develop advanced search interfaces and functionality, while indexing information in various RDF stores.

In the past, Jonathan has worked extensively for private clients and with Drupal for CivicActions, was the web developer and trainer at Simmons College, Boston, and worked for a MMOG maker in the Boston area, Turbine Inc. In addition to the years involved with technology clients, he has also worked with and volunteered for numerous environmental organizations, and is interested in conflict resolution through technology - which led him to found a non-profit in 2004, Equiforum.

Currently he is working on a startup.

He lives in Valencia Spain, where he will be married this summer.

Date:

25th of February 2008

Time:

09:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Novel developments and application areas for GSN

Ali Salehi

EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract

To minimize the unnecessary and repetitive tasks involved in deploying the wireless sensor networks (WSN), we designed and developed the Global Sensor Networks (GSN) middleware which supports the flexible integration of sensor networks and sensor data, enables fast deployment. In this presentation we present the current status of the GSN, our plans to extend the software and some of the application areas for which GSN is used for. GSN is jointly developed by EPFL and DERI. For more information, please visit: http://gsn.sf.net

Date:

28th of January 2008

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Computer Science 2.0: A New World of Data Management

Michael Brodie

Chief Scientist, Verizon Communications, USA

Abstract

Data management, one of the most successful software technologies, is the bedrock of almost all business, government, and scientific activities, worldwide. Data management continues to grow, more than doubling in data and transaction volumes every two years with a growth in deployments to fuel a $15 billion market. A continuous stream of innovations in capabilities, robustness, and features lead to new, previously infeasible data-intensive applications. Yet forty years of DBMS innovation are pushing DBMSs beyond the complexity barrier where one-size-fits-all DBMSs does not meet the requirements of emerging applications. While data management growth will continue based primarily on the relational data model and conventional DBMSs, a much larger and more challenging data management world is emerging. In the 1990's data under DBMS management reached 10% of the world's data. The six-fold growth of non-relational data in the period 2006-2010 will reduce that number to well below 5%.

We are entering the next generation of computing with a fundamentally different computing model and paradigm characterized technologically by multi-core architectures, virtualization, service-oriented computing, and the semantic web. Computer Science 2.0 will mark the end of the Computing Era with its focus on technology and the beginning of the Problem Solving Era with its focus on higher levels of abstraction and automation (i.e., intelligent) tools for real world (i.e., imprecise) domains in which approximate and ever-changing answers are the norm.

This confluence of limitations of conventional DBMSs, the explosive growth of previously unimagined applications and data, and the genuine need for problem solving will result in a new world of data management.

The data management world should embrace these opportunities and provide leadership for data management in Computer Science 2.0. Two emerging areas that lack such guidance are service-oriented computing and the semantic web. While concepts and standards are evolving for data management in service-oriented architectures, data services or data virtualization has not been a focus of the DBMS research or products communities. Missing this opportunity will be worse than missing the Internet. The semantic web will become the means by which information is accessed and managed with modest projections of 40 billion pages with hundreds of triples per page - the largest distributed system in the world - the only one. Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium view databases are being nodes that need to be turned inside out. What does the database community think? Semantic web services will constitute a programming model of Computer Science 2.0. How does data management fit into this semantically rich environment?

Computer Science 2.0 offers the data management community one of the biggest challenges in its forty-year history and opens up a new world of data management. Key to success in this new world will be collaboration with other disciplines whether at the technical level - partnering with the semantic technologies community to augment their reasoning capabilities with systems support - or at the problem solving level - partnering with real world domains as proposed by the new discipline of Web Science.

Bio: Michael Brodie

Dr. Michael L. Brodie is Chief Scientist of Verizon Services Operations in Verizon Communications, one of the world's leading providers of communications services.
Dr. Brodie works on large-scale strategic Information Technology opportunities and challenges to deliver business value from advanced and emerging technologies and practices. He is concerned with the Big Picture, core technologies, and integration within a large scale, operational telecommunications environment.
Dr. Brodie holds a PhD in Databases from the University of Toronto and has active interests in the Semantic Web, SOA, and other advanced technologies to address secure, interoperable information systems, databases, infrastructure and application architectures. Dr. Brodie has authored over 150 books, chapters, and articles and has presented over 100 keynotes or invited lectures in over 30 countries. Dr. Brodie is a member of the United States of America National Academies Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and other National Goals, co-chaired by Dr. Charles Vest, president emeritus of MIT and Dr. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. He is Adjunct Professor, National University of Ireland, Galway; on several advisory boards: Semantic Technology Institutes International, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics; School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland; European Commission's Information Society Technologies priority of the Framework Programmes; Forrester Research, Inc.; VLDB (Very Large Databases) Endowment; editorial boards of several research journals. Dr. Brodie is Assistant Scout Master in Troop63 Sudbury, MA.

Date:

21st of January 2008

Time:

10:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Public PhD defense presentation - Algorithms and Components for Application Development on the Semantic Web

Eyal Oren

VU Amsterdam

Abstract

The Web has grown from a tool for scientific communication into an indispensable form of communication. Although originally developed to facilitate knowledge management, the reuse of information on the Web is limited. The lack of reuse is the result of data hidden inside relational databases: closed systems with a rigid schema structure, a lack of universal, reusable, identifiers, and a lack of expressive and extensible schema. The Semantic Web improves the Web infrastructure with formal semantics and interlinked data, enabling flexible, reusable, and open knowledge management systems.

The move towards open and interlinked data on the Web and the Semantic Web results in more open systems. In contrast to traditional database-driven applications, sources are decentralised, data can be semi-structured with arbitrary vocabulary and contributions can be published anywhere. But opening up applications and their data raises

challenges: how to programmatically access and manipulate the web of linked data, how to visualise and navigate the information graph, how to converge user-provided content, and how to find relevant data in distributed sources.

The PhD thesis presented in this talk offers algorithms and components that simplify and support knowledge management based on Semantic Web technology. We address four areas of Semantic Web application

development: programmatic access: how to program against the flexible graph-based model; data navigation: how to navigate arbitrary information spaces; data entry: how to guide users through collaborative recommendation; and data discovery: how to locate relevant data sources. Our hypothesis is that the issues of programmatic access, data navigation, data entry, and data discovery can be addressed, with acceptable results, through the sole introspection of instance data at runtime, without relying on fixed schema structures at design time. In all four areas we devise solutions (an object-oriented data mapping, a generic navigation interface, a collaborative recommendation algorithm and a scalable lookup service) that are domain-independent, rely only on instance data and dynamically adjust to the available data.

Bio: Eyal Oren

Eyal Oren is a PhD student and researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He has published around thirty papers in international conferences and workshops. His research is oriented on development of Semantic Web applications and in particular on data-driven techniques for data manipulation, vocabulary recommendation and data navigation.
He is the creator and developer of ActiveRDF, which integrates RDF data into Ruby-on-Rails, BrowseRDF, which allows automatic faceted navigation of RDF data, SemperWiki, a personal semantic wiki, and the Sindice.com Semantic Web lookup service. He has also worked and published in the fields of business process management, B2B integration and semantic Web services. See his homepage on http://www.eyaloren.org/ for more information.

Date:

27th of November 2007

Time:

09:15 AM - 10:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Understanding tractable decompositions for constraint satisfaction

Zoltan Miklos

University of Oxford

Abstract

Many important problems in computer science and in artificial intelligence can be modelled as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). As solving a CSPs is NP-complete in general, it is important to identify tractable subclasses. A possible way to find such subclasses is to associate a graph to the problem and impose restrictions on its structure. This is what I will discuss in this talk. We review the most important decomposition methods arising in this way, in particular the generalizations of the concept of hypergraph acyclicity. I will give a high level introduction to the methods and techniques and explain the concepts with the help of some combinatorial games in a very intuitive way. I will also report on some computational experiments and applications.

The talk is based on papers by I. Adler, G. Gottlob, M. Grohe, N. Leone, Z.M., F. Scarcello, T. Schwentick, and others.

Date:

22nd of October 2007

Time:

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Meeting Room A

Faithful and effective querying of RDF ontologies using DLV-DB

Giovambattista Ianni

Universita della Calabria

Abstract

Ontologies are pervading many areas of knowledge representation and management. To date, most research efforts have been spent on the development of sufficiently expressive languages for the representation and querying of ontologies; however, querying efficiency has received attention only recently, especially for ontologies referring to large amounts of data. In fact, it is still uncertain how reasoning tasks will scale when applied on massive amounts of data. This work is a first step toward this setting: it first shows that RDF(S) ontologies can be expressed, without loss of semantics, into answer set programming. Then, based on a previous result showing that the SPARQL query language (a candidate W3C recommendation for querying ontologies) can be mapped to a rule based language with stable model semantics, it shows that efficient querying of big ontologies can be accomplished with a database oriented extension of the well known ASP system DLV, we recently developed. Initial results, reported in the paper, show that our proposed framework is promising for the improvement of both scalability and expressiveness of available RDF query systems.

Bio: Giovambattista Ianni

Giovambattista Ianni is Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics of University of Calabria since 2002. He collaborates in the DLV developers’ team, one of the major state-of-the-art Answer Set Programming systems, and is responsible for the design and implementation of some of its language extensions. He was Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Information Systems of the TU-Wien from August 2004 to August 2005. He still collaborates with the Institute in the context of the project "Answer Programming for the Semantic Web", where extensions of ASP for coping with Semantic Web are investigated. Notably, he is co-author of the work that won the best paper award at ESWC 2006. He has published more than 30 articles in journals and conferences. He was organising co-chair of the JELIA 2002 and LPNMR 2005 conferences, as well as editor of the JELIA 2002 proceedings. He has served on several programme committees, such as RuleML 2006, ECAI 2006, WI/IAT 2005, NMR 2004 and AGP 2003. He was the project manager of the EU INFOMIX project and has been involved in a number of national and international research projects, including the EU Working Group WASP.

Date:

16th of October 2007

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Emergent Semantics: Rethinking Interoperability for Large Scale Decentralized Information Systems

Dr. Philippe Cudre-Mauroux

EPFL

Abstract

In the past, the problem of interoperability in information systems was solved by means of centralization, both at a system and at a logical level. We argue that traditional top-down integration techniques are inapplicable to large-scale, decentralized information systems and propose a new integration architecture based on peer-to-peer schema mappings and dynamic self-organization. We model semantics as bottom-up and dynamic agreements among heterogeneous parties. We consider both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents whose utility functions depend on the proper interpretation of the symbols. We introduce new metrics to capture the semantic mismatch between pairs of acquainted information systems. We describe a totally decentralized message passing scheme based on transitive closures of mappings to efficiently evaluate our metrics. We also show how to take advantage of our metrics to gradually alleviate mapping inconsistencies, and to quantify through a graph-theoretic analysis the quality of the global agreement that can be achieved in that way. Finally, we describe two systems illustrating the practical applicability of our ideas.

Bio: Dr. Philippe Cudre-Mauroux

Philippe Cudre-Mauroux is a senior researcher at EPFL in Switzerland. His research interests are in information management in large-scale settings with an emphasis on semantic overlay networks and peer data management. He is a member of the IFIP Working Group 2.6 on Databases.

Date:

30th of August 2007

Time:

02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Semantic Overlay Networks

Dr. Philippe Cudre-Mauroux

EPFL

Abstract

Recently, a significant number of uncorrelated research efforts focused on enriching Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems with more expressive data models and query languages. As a result, various Semantic Overlay Networks
(SON) supporting relational, semi-structured or triple-based collections of data over decentralized P2P networks started to appear. SON systems can be considered as truly unique as they aim at managing structured data in very large-scale, decentralized, heterogeneous and highly dynamic environments. In this presentation, I will give a high-level overview and some technical details on a handful of SON systems.

Bio: Dr. Philippe Cudre-Mauroux

Date:

30th of August 2007

Time:

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Functionality Sharing in Open Environments

Prof. Birgitta König-Ries

Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena

Date:

21st of August 2007

Time:

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in Seminar Room

Material (Slides):

fileadmin/docume...

Integration of Semantic Web Services and Grid technologies - challenges and implications

Radek Wegrowski

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.

Date:

14th of September 2005

Time:

02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in 115

SweetRules - An Integrated Set of tools for Semantic Web Rules and Ontologies

Benjamin Grosof, MIT Sloan School of Management

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, MIT Sloan School of Management

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.

Date:

07th of June 2005

Time:

01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, University of Innsbruk in 115

Videolink:

testcms.deri.ie

SOC4DIBPM - Supporting XO Business Processes the Flexible Way

Professor Paul Grefen

Eindhoven University of Technology

Abstract

Service-oriented computing (SOC) technology is considered one of the promising technologies for business-to-business (B2B) integration in the e-business arena. The basic SOC paradigm, however, is more geared towards the support of business functions than towards the support for complex, inter-organizational business process in dynamic e-business settings. In this presentation, we analyze the requirements for the support of business processes and put these in the context of existing SOC technology. We describe an application of SOC technology providing dedicated support for dynamic business process management across the boundaries of (autonomous) organizations. The combination of SOC technology and workflow management (WFM) technology provides the basis for full-fledged dynamic inter-organizational business process management. We conclude that the current state of the art does not yet provide an integrated solution, but that many ingredients are available or under development. In the end of the presentation, we give an overview of various research efforts in which we currently participate and place them in the context of the framework discussed before.

Bio: Professor Paul Grefen

Paul Grefen is a full professor in the Department of Technology Management at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he leads the ICT Architectures group. From 1992 until 2003, he held assistant and associate professor positions in the Information Systems and Database Groups of the Computer Science Department at the University of Twente. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Twente on the subject of integrity control in parallel database systems. He was a visiting researcher at Stanford University in 1994. From 1995 to 1999, he was involved in the WIDE ESPRIT project, which focused on advanced database support for workflow management systems. From 1998 to 2000, he was involved in the CrossFlow ESPRIT project, which aimed at the development of cross-organizational workflow support for dynamic virtual enterprises. He has been a member of the program committees of a large number of international conferences and a regular reviewer for several international journals. He was main editor of the book on the WIDE project and has published a book on workflow management. His current research interests include architectural design of complex information systems, high-level transaction management, advanced workflow management, and contract support in electronic business.

Date:

17th of May 2005

Time:

11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Semantic Web Services Cluster Research Seminar

All student members of the SWS Cluster

Abstract

This is one of a series of research seminars for the Semantic Web Services cluster. The seminars gives research students the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. Overall, the seminars raise the visibility of the research being undertaken within the SWS cluster.

Date:

14th - 16th of February 2005

Time:

07:00 AM - 08:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Web Services Composition Languages: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Prof.dr.ir.Wil van der Aalst, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

Abstract

The recently released Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) is said to combine the best of other standards for web services composition such as WSFL from IBM and XLANG of Microsoft. BPEL4WS allows for a mixture of block structured and graph structured process models thus making the language expressive at the price of being complex. Although BPEL4WS is not such a bad proposal by itself, it is remarkable how much attention this standard receives while the more fundamental issues and problems such as semantics, expressiveness, and adequacy do not get the attention they deserve. Having a standard is a very good idea. However, there are too many of them and most of them die before becoming mature. A simple indicator of this development is the increasing length of acronyms: PDL, XPDL, BPSS, EDOC, BPML, WSDL, WSCI, ebXML, and BPEL4WS are just some of the acronyms referring to various standards in the domain. Another problem is that these languages typically have no clearly defined semantics. The only way to overcome these problems is to critically evaluate the so-called standards for web services composition, and learn from 25 years of experiences in the workflow/office automation domain.

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, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

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.

Date:

20th of December 2004

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

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

Dr. Jan vom Brocke, Maik A. Lindner, European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS)

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.

Bio: Dr. Jan vom Brocke, Maik A. Lindner, European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS)

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.

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.

Date:

29th of November 2004

Time:

02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

GATE, SWAN and New Developments in Social Software

Dr. Hamish Cunningham

Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield

Abstract

This talk will cover three related topics:

(1) The problem of bringing together natural languae content and semantic representations for next-generation knowledge management and other applications, and how the GATE system (http://gate.ac.uk) is addressing this problem in projects like SEKT, KnowledgeWeb and LIRICS
(2) The DERI SWAN project for large-scale semantic annotation using GATE and OntoText's KIM system (http://www.ontotext.com)
(3) New developments in social software, and how your TV is going to be The Next Big Thing in semantics applications

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/

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.

Date:

05th of October 2004

Time:

04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Service Infrastructure - A bus for all IT

Dr. Frank Leymann

Chief Architect at IBM

Abstract

Bio: Dr. Frank Leymann

Dr. Leymann is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He is the chief architect of IBM's workflow technology, and a member of the IBM Application Integration Middleware (AIM) Architecture Board that sets the overall direction of IBM's middleware. He has worked on database systems, database tools, and transaction processing. Dr. Leymann has published many papers in various journals and conference proceedings, filed a multitude of patents, and is the coauthor of textbooks on repositories and workflow systems. He served on program committees and organization committees for many international conferences and is editor of the journal of the database management system special interest group of the German computer society Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).

Date:

15th of September 2004

Time:

01:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Community Web or yet another CSCW (Community-Supported Creative Web)

Dr. Hideaki Takeda

Abstract

Web was orginally designed to enhance information and knowledge exchange but needs more functions to facilitate knowledge exploitation. We propose a framework to facilitate personal knowledge exploitation called ICAN (Information and Communication Activities Navigation), which includes collect, create, donate, relate, collaborate, and present activities. Semblog project is realization of ICAN. Semblog provides an integrated environment for distributing small contents and making human relationship seamlessly. It enables people to exchange information and knowledge with easy and casual fashion in degrees of personal interest, e.g. checking, clipping, and posting. Semblog extends Weblogs by adding semantic tags to Weblog sites and entries with RSS/FOAF aggregators, for an egocentric search method and recommendation. We design a new metadata module to define personal ontology that realizes semantic relations among people and Weblog sites.

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.

Date:

03rd of September 2004

Time:

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

A Logic for Specifying Contracts in Semantic Web Services

Prof. Michael Kifer

Stony Brook University of New York

Abstract

A Logic for Specifying Contracts in Semantic Web Services*
Michael Kifer, Department of Computer Science
State University of New York at Stony Brook
USA
* Joint work with Hasan Davulcu and I.V. Tamakrishnan

A requirements analysis in the emerging field of Semantic Web Services (SWS) (see http://daml.org/services/swsl/requirements/) has identified four major areas of research:

intelligent service discovery
automated contracting of services
process modeling
and service enactment.

This paper deals with the intersection of two of the areas: process modeling as it pertains to automated contracting. Specifically, we propose a logic, called CTR-S, which captures the dynamic aspects of contracting for services. Since CTR-S is an extension of the classical first-order logic, it is well-suited to model the static aspects of contracting as well. A distinctive feature of contracting is that it involves two or more parties in a potentially adversarial situation. CTR-S is designed to model this adversarial situation through its novel model theory, which incorporates certain game-theoretic concepts. In addition to the model theory, we developed a proof theory for CTR-S and demonstrate the use of the logic for modeling and reasoning about Web service contracts.

Bio: Prof. 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.

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~kifer/

Date:

20th of July 2004

Time:

09:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Dynamic Web Service Integration

Dr. Charles J. Petrie

Abstract

We describe requirements for a WSDL++ that would allow Business Service Directories to return not simply single services but rather plans for combinations of services to achieve the intended effects. This is part of a larger vision of virtual enterprises and dynamic processes that would render irrelevant BPEL4WS-like approaches to process choreography and ochestration. The new approach requires cultural and possibly legal changes, but none worse than has already occured with consumer use of credit cards on the Internet. We describe the substantial research challenges.

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.

http://snrc.stanford.edu/~petrie/

Date:

15th of July 2004

Time:

03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

CORSO spaces: an enabling infrastructure for GRID computing and semantic web

Professor Dr. Eva Kühn

Abstract

CORSO (Coordinated Shared Objects) is a genuinely distributed implementation of the space based computing paradigm, based on research work carried out at the Vienna University of Technology. Communication is abstracted in that applications simply read and write objects in a shared space. The automatic and intelligent distribution of required data in the network is technically accomplished by built-in replication protocols, providing the advantages of fault-tolerance, scalability and fail-over. At any time, each participant in the network has a unified and consistent view of the state of the entire distributed system. Participants detect each other autonomously. Required information (e.g. current load, provided services) is automatically replicated in near-time to all authorized parties. Based on this information each participant may: optimize its own behaviour, manage itself, perform smart decisions, and join and leave dynamically. There is no need for a central coordinator which allows the self-organisation and self-healing of software components.
With the abstraction of a space, the software application layer is virtualised: the space realizes a complete separation between application logic (SW) and physical infra-structure (HW, network, topology). CORSO offers language bindings for .NET, Java and C++ on UNIX, Linux, Windows, z/OS and mobile platforms, can be integrated into existing frameworks like J2EE and .NET, and can be used as an enabling middleware infra-structure paradigm for enterprise GRID computing and semantic web technology.

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.

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/eva

Date:

14th of July 2004

Time:

11:00 AM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Databases: The Relational Logic Approach

Prof. Michael Genesereth

Abstract

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the amount of "structured" data available on the world's computer networks, and all indicators suggest that this trend will continue in the years to come. Unfortunately, accessing this information in an integrated way is complicated by "semantic heterogeneity" among the data sources, i.e. differences in their schemas and vocabulary. In this presentation, we will look at this problem in detail. We will see why relational algebra is inadequate for the task and why relational logic, being more expressive, solves the problem. We will look at one particular data integration system, called Infomaster, and a variety of its applications. Finally, we will discuss some of the practical problems in developing large scale "datawebs", and we will examine the prospects for for building a fully integrated "World Information Network", essentially a World Wide Web for databases.

Bio: Prof. 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.

http://logic.stanford.edu/people/genesereth/

Date:

13th of July 2004

Time:

03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

UDDI / BSR Requirements Gap Analysis

Dr. Charles J. Petrie

Abstract

We examine the requirements for a WSDL-based Business Services Registry, and examine the gap between these requirements and the existing UDDI specification and implementation. We illustrate at least better interface and describe some of the research issues.

Bio: Dr. Charles J. Petrie

http://snrc.stanford.edu/~petrie/

Date:

12th of July 2004

Time:

04:00 PM - 06:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Bootstrapping the Semantic Web: A Machine Learning Approach

Dr. Nick Kushmerick

Computer Science Department at University College Dublin

Abstract

The Semantic Web has attracted substantial attention since the vision was first articulated several years ago. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web augments traditional Web content with explicit machine-processable semantic metadata, enabling automated content retrieval, manipulation and aggregation. The initial futuristic vision has matured into a carefully crafted set of technical proposals, such as the Resource Description Framework and the Web Ontology Language. However, it is widely recognized the Semantic Web will not "take off" until a critical mass of semantic metadata is actually available. This dilemma gives rise to an interesting challenge for machine learning: Can we bootstrap the Semantic Web by training learning algorithms on small amounts of hand-annotated Semantic Web content? In this talk, I will summarize two ongoing research projects. First, I will describe our work on adaptive information extraction (learning to convert natural language documents into structured database-like entities). Our extraction algorithm outperforms several competitors on a range of tasks. Second, I will describe our learning approach to annotating Web Services with semantic metadata. Web Services have a rich relational structure, and we have developed a novel iterative classification algorithm that exploits this structure. This research is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the US Office of Naval Research, and is joint work with Aidan Finn and Andreas Hess.

Bio: Dr. Nick Kushmerick

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.

Date:

18th of June 2004

Time:

03:00 PM - 04:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Presentation of IRS II and Magpie from The Open University

John Domingue

Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Abstract

IRS-II: A Framework and Infrastructure for Semantic Web Services
Semantic web services hold enormous potential. The augmentation of web services with formal descriptions of their competence will facilitate their automatic location, mediation, and composition. In this talk I will describe IRS-II (Internet Reasoning Service) a framework and implemented infrastructure to support the publication, location, and execution of heterogeneous web services, augmented with semantic descriptions of their functionalities. IRS-II has three main classes of features which distinguish it from other work on semantic web services. Firstly, by automatically creating wrappers, software implemented as standalone Java or Lisp programs or as HTTP accessible web applications can be published through the IRS-II very easily. Secondly, because IRS-II is built on a knowledge modelling framework, we provide support for capability-driven service invocation, for flexible mappings between services and problem specifications and we support dynamic, knowledge-based service selection. Finally, IRS-II services are web service compatible – standard web services can be trivially published through the IRS-II and any IRS-II service automatically appears as a standard web service to other web service infrastructures. In the talk I will illustrate the main functionalities of IRS-II through a live demonstration.

More information on IRS-II including papers, demonstration movies and software (the IRS-II browser and publishing platform) are available from http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/irs/.

Magpie – Towards a Semantic Web Browser
Web browsing involves two tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. So far, research has focused on supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mechanisms, or semantically-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this talk I will describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie offers complementary knowledge sources, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowledge relevant to a web resource. Magpie automatically associates an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be invoked within a standard web browser. Hence, Magpie may be seen as a step towards a semantic web browser. In the talk I will illustrate Magpie’s functionality with a number of live demonstrations.

More information on Magpie including papers, demonstration movies and a plugin for Internet Explorer are available from http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/magpie/.

Date:

11th of March 2004

Time:

10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Presentation of the Intelligent Topic Manager (ITM) Solution from Mondeca SA

Jean Delahousse,

CEO, Mondeca AT

Abstract

ITM, a knowledge management solution developed by Mondeca based on Semantic Web technologies, is one of the most elaborate industrial efforts in Semantic Web enabled web applications.
The aim of this presentation is to provide an overview of ITM and to explore possible future collaborations between DERI and Mondeca.

Date:

01st of March 2004

Time:

12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Reducing SHIQ - Description Logic to Disjunctive Datalog Programs

Boris Motik

FZI Karlsruhe

Abstract

Motivated by the prospects of reusing optimization techniques from deductive databases, in this talk, I present a novel approach to checking consistency of ABoxes, instance checking and query answering, w.r.t. ontologies formulated using a slight restriction of the description logic SHIQ. The approach proceeds in three steps: (i) the ontology is translated into first-order clauses, (ii) TBox and RBox clauses are saturated using a resolution-based decision procedure, and (iii) the saturated set of clauses is translated into a disjunctive datalog program. Thus, query answering can be performed on the resulting program, while applying all existing optimization techniques, such as join-order optimizations or magic sets. Equally important, the resolution-based decision procedure I present is the first one which, for a description logic with inverse roles and number restrictions, and for unary coding of numbers, is worst-case optimal, i.e. it runs in ExpTime.

Date:

27th of February 2004

Time:

01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Dynamic Web services composition using Problem-solving methods

Prof. Sung Kook Han

Visiting Professor at DERI Innsbruck, Dept. of computer Eng., Won Kwang Univ., Korea

Abstract

To resolve the impediments of interoperability and portability in heterogeneous components composition, problem-solving methods (PSM) that can provide the architectural description and the reasoning processes are necessary for the composition of loosely-coupled, heterogeneous Web services components.

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.

Date:

23rd of February 2004

Time:

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

General Reference Enterprise Architecture

Prof. Yuliu Chen

Deptartmenet of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Abstract

1. "Add Process View into General Reference Enterprise Architecture"

- 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

Date:

23rd of January 2004

Time:

11:00 AM - 01:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Semantic Matching

Ilya Zaihrayeu

University of Trento

Abstract

The progress of information and communication technologies has made accessible a large amount of information stored in different application-specific databases and web sites. The number of different information resources is rapidly increasing, and the problem of semantic heterogeneity is becoming more and more severe. One proposed solution is matching. We think of match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., database schemas or ontologies) and produces a mapping between elements of the two graphs that correspond semantically to each other. So far, the key intuition underlying all the approaches to matching has been to map labels (of nodes) and to look for similarity (between labels) using syntax driven techniques and syntactic similarity measures. We say that all these approaches are different variations of syntactic matching. In syntactic matching semantics are not analyzed directly, but semantic correspondences are searched for only on the basis of syntactic features. We propose a novel approach, called semantic matching, with the following main features:

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.

Date:

22nd of January 2004

Time:

03:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Trust Negotiation

Daniel Olmedilla

L3S, Universität Hannover

Abstract

Researchers have recently begun to develop and investigate policy languages to describe trust and security requirements on the Semantic Web. Such policies will be one component of a run-time system that can negotiate to establish trust on the Semantic Web. PeerTrust can be used to express different kinds of access control policies and control their use at run time, a new approach to basis for PeerTrust's simple yet expressive policy and trust negotiation language, built upon the rule layer of the Semantic Web layer cake. PeerTrust can be used to support delegation, policy protection and negotiation strategies.

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.

Date:

22nd of January 2004

Time:

02:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in 115 Science and Technology Buillding

Advanced Programming with Frame-based Logic Languages - Tutorial

Michael Kifer

Stony Brook University of New York

Abstract

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.

Date:

05th - 07th of January 2004

Time:

08:00 AM - 05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in 115 Science and Technology Building

Technologies for the Semantic Web: Lessons from Building Knowledge-Based Systems

Prof. Mark Musen

Professor of Medicine and Computer Science, Stanford University

Abstract

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.

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

Date:

18th of December 2003

Time:

05:00 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Jena Tutorial

Andy Seaborne, Chris Dolan

HP Labs Bristol

Abstract

Andy Seaborne and Chris Dolan present an introduction to RDF, Jena (a framework for writing semantic web applications) and Joseki (the Jena RDF Server).

Date:

11th of December 2003

Time:

02:30 PM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

Planning for Web Services

Mark Carman

Trento University

Abstract

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

Date:

11th of December 2003

Time:

09:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway in 115 Science and Technology Buillding

Description Logic Tutorial

Ian Horrocks, Sean Bechhofer (University of Manchester)

Abstract

Ian Horrocks and Sean Bechhofer from the University of Manchester, both involved in the field of Description Logics and the development of the Web Ontology Language OWL, will be coming to Innsbruck on 25 November to give a tutorial on Description Logic reasoning.
The tutorial will consist of two parts: a theoretical part, with an intensive tutorial on Description Logic and a practical part, consisting of a hands-on training of Description Logic reasoning using OilEd and FaCT.
The tutorial will take place at the Institute for Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck Austria.

Website Ian Horrocks: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/%7Ehorrocks/

Website Sean Bechhofer: http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/seanb/

Date:

25th of November 2003

Time:

09:00 AM

Location:

DERI, NUI Galway

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