The vision of the Semantic Web has always been a global Web of knowledge parallel to the existing Web of data. This vision has been returned to numerous times, including the call for ISWC 2005 to "put the Web back in the Semantic Web", or Tim Berners-Lee's recent post on the Giant Global Graph.
Figure 1: A global Web of knowledge and services
While standards and technology progress towards maturity, and Semantic Computing is reaching readiness for isolated application (e.g., behind company firewalls), the challenges of the originally envisioned global Semantic Web have received less attention. We expect millions, even billions, of knowledge and service providers and consumers to interact, integrate and coordinate (Figure 1). Technological solutions paying tribute to the issues of scalability, heterogeneity, dynamism, distributedness and openness that come along in such an environment are thus a necessity.
With this workshop we aim at bringing together promising cutting-edge middleware and Semantic Computing research, which - in integration and coordination rather than in current isolation - address the aforementioned challenges and can form a new semantic middleware layer that enables the global Web of knowledge and services, and hence the true Semantic Web vision. We address the traditional issues of data and process heterogeneity, however with a clear focus on large-scale, open and distributed environments, i.e. in settings that match the Semantic Web in the true Web sense, rather than on a corporate or even application level.
Middleware technology is traditionally seen to provide the functionality necessary to abstract providers and consumers from syntactic and technical heterogeneities. However, it is clear that for the Semantic Web, current solutions such as CORBA are not appropriate. The same holds for the Semantic Web service approaches proposed in the last years, which focus on the automation of the tasks in the process of using Web services and building service-oriented architectures (publishing, discovery, composition). For a truly global Semantic Web it is necessary that novel middleware solutions are developed and that further synergies between existing Semantic Computing and non-semantic technologies are exploited in integrated manners. The outcome of the workshop is thus expected to provide new insights, ideas, and technologies that enable a semantic middleware that delivers an interaction and coordination platform, and that virtually grants access to the available knowledge and services on the global Semantic Web.
In consequence the workshop focuses on three cutting edge Semantic Computing research areas whose integration is expected to enable the new semantic middleware:
- access and discovery to distributed knowledge
- semantic service oriented architectures
- integration and coordination of knowledge and service providers and consumers
The workshop will collect the best results from these fields, while clearly favoring proposals that might deliver solutions to all three of them. We clearly focus on approaches that exploit the synergies between the three fields in order to develop novel and promising technologies towards a global Web of knowledge and services.
We welcome original academia and industry papers or project descriptions that propose innovative approaches to build a semantic middleware layer for the Web.
The topics of interest of this workshop include but are not limited to:
- Languages, programming and implementation techniques for middleware technology
- Extensions of existing middleware such as Web services, GRID, tuplespaces, message oriented middleware with semantic technologies
- Software architecture and software engineering techniques for building semantic middleware
- The usage of ontologies and reasoning in relation with middleware technologies
- Methods to deal with the complexity of managing distributed knowledge and processes
- Methods to deal with coordination of distributed services and applications working with semantic data
- Metadata infrastructures for the modeling and management of semantic middleware
- Self-organization in semantic middleware systems
- Reasoning about middleware structures, tasks and behavior
- Meta-level architectures and reflective middleware: inspection and adaptation
- Mobility-aware semantic middleware
- Practical experiences in using semantic middleware to realize service-oriented architectures, knowledge engineering systems, i.e. the Web of knowledge
- Deployment perspectives for future semantic middleware
- Studies on existing and emerging target markets for semantically enabled middleware
Elena Simperl
University of Innsbruck (Semantic Technology Institute)
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Reto Krummenacher
University of Innsbruck (Semantic Technology Institute)
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Lyndon J B Nixon
Free University of Berlin
Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Robert Tolksdorf
Free University of Berlin
Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Christoph Bussler, Merced Systems Inc., USA
Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, MIT CSAIL, USA
Edward Curry, National University of Ireland, Galway
John Davies, British Telecom, UK
David De Roure, University of Southampton, UK
John Domingue, Open University, UK
Fabien Gandon, INRIA, France
Daniel Martin, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Ronaldo Menezes , Florida Institute of Technology, USA
Meena Nagarajan, University of Georgia, USA
Daniel Oberle, SAP Karlsruhe, Germany
Ian Oliver, Nokia Research, Finland
Emanuele della Valle, CEFRIEL, Politecnica di Milano, Italy
Alan Wood, University of York, UK
- Submission Deadline:
- April 4 April 27
- Notification:
- May 5
- Camera-Ready & Registration:
- May 16
- Conference and Workshops:
- August 4-7
Authors should submit a 6-page paper in double-column IEEE format following the submission guidelines available on the ICSC2008 Web page. All workshop papers will be included in the IEEE conference proceedings.
Please submit your contributions via EDAS.
Final program for the workshop on August 4, 2008.
09:30 - 10:00 Opening, Introduction and Objectives
10:00 - 11:00 Invited Talk: Ian Oliver, Nokia Research Center Finland
Personal Semantic Web Through A Space Based Computing Environment
The Semantic Web in its current form represents information that is
either static or monotonically changing. It has its roots in the World Wide Web and thus takes this web-wide persona. The information and ontologies used have
standard web-wide semantics grounded in common and generally accepted real-world
concepts. Deviation from this - at least in the semantic sense is not permitted.
Much of the usage of information - that will invariably become part of
the Web - will be personal and/or local; its semantics, structure and adherence
to real-world concepts will be grounded by the local users of that information
resulting in many localised Semantic Webs.
These local Semantic Webs will contain information that is highly
dynamic, non-mononticaly changing, adhering loosely (if at all) to their stated
ontologies or even not to any standardised, written, commonly understood ontology and behave and be reasoned about according localised, non-standard and
non-intuitive logics.
The dynamicity and monotonicty of information in and forming the Semantic
Web will vary depending upon locality and be organised according to person,
usage etc as - what we term - spaces.
We describe here our vision and an architectural concept regarding the
development of these small, localised information or knowledge spaces by
which persons via autonomous agents interact through control-flow-free
mechanisms.
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:15 Paper Session I
- Towards a Semantic Enabled Middleware for Publish/Subscribe Applications
Federico Facca, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Srdjan Komazec, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Michal Zaremba, University of Innsbruck, Austria - Implementing Agent-Based Middleware for the Semantic Web
Artem Katasonov, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Vagan Terziyan, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
12:15 - 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 14:30 Paper Session II
- Towards a RESTful Plug and Play Experience in the Web of Things
Vlad Stirbu, Nokia Research Center, Finland - Implementation of a novel Semantic Web middleware approach based on triplespaces
Kia Teymourian, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Lyndon Nixon, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Daniel Wutke, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Hans Moritsch, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Reto Krummenacher, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Eva Kühn, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Christian Schreiber, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
14:30 - 15:30 Open Forum, Discussion and Wrap-Up
15:30 - 16:00 Closing Coffee
Reto Krummenacher
University of Innsbruck (Semantic Technology Institute)
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
E reto.krummenacher@sti-innsbruck.at
T +43 512 507 6452
F +43 512 507 9872