Keynote Speakers

John Domingue

Open University, United Kingdom

Dr. John Domingue is the Deputy Director of the Knowledge Media Institute. Over the last decade he has focused on how ontologies and web technologies can facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. His current work is focused around the Internet Reasoning Service (IRS) which is a WSMO compliant framework and platform for creating and deploying semantic web services. The IRS has already been used in a number of hands on sessions to educate 150 learners.

He is a co Investigator on the UK EPSRC funded Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project, the Scientific Director of the EU funded Integrated Project on Semantic Web Services DIP (FP6 - 507483), and a chair of the WSMO working group. John Domingue will Chair next year's European Semantic Web Conference and will be the programme chair for AIMSA 2006. [source]

John Domingue's website

Title of presentation: Semantic Web Services and Business Processes: Approaches and Applications [abstract]

Alois Ferscha

Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Prof. Alois Ferscha joined the University of Linz as full professor where he is now head of the department for Pervasive Computing and the speaker of the JKU Pervasive Computing Initiative. He has published on topics related to parallel and distributed computing, like e.g. Computer Aided Parallel Software Engineering, Performance Oriented Distributed/Parallel Program Development, Parallel and Distributed Discrete Event Simulation, Performance Modeling/Analysis of Parallel Systems and Parallel Visual Programming.

Title of presentation: Digital Artefacts [abstract]

Dr. Wei-Ying Ma

Microsoft Research Asia, China

Dr. Wei-Ying Ma is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (www) where he leads the Web Search & Data Mining Group. Prior to joining MSR Asia in 2001, he was with HP Labs where he worked in the field of multimedia adaptation and distributed media services infrastructure.

From 1994 to 1997 he was engaged in the Alexandria Digital Library project in UCSB while completing his Ph.D. he currently serves as an Editor for the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal and Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Information System. He has served on the organizing and program committees of many international conferences including ACM Multimedia, SIGIR, CIKM, WWW, ICME, CVPR, and was the general co-chair of the International Multimedia Modeling Conference 2005 and International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval 2005.

Over the course of his career, he has published 5 book chapters and over 150 international journal and conference papers.

Title of presentation: Building Infrastructure for Web-scale Data Mining [abstract]

Wasim Sadiq

SAP Research, Australia

Dr. Wasim Sadiq works at SAP Research as Research Program Manager of Business Process Management and Semantic Interoperability. Before joining SAP, he was working as Project Leader / Senior Research Scientist at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre. His primary area of interest is advanced business process management technology. His other research interests include Database Systems, Information Systems Integration, Data warehousing, Web Based Information Systems Engineering, e-services, and Distributed Enterprise Computing.

He has a PhD in Computer Science from the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His PhD thesis was in the area of workflow modeling and verification. He also holds an MSc degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand.

Business Process Management and Semantic Interoperability Research Program

Title of presentation: Have BPMS delivered for Processes like DBMS have for Data? [abstract]

A Min Tjoa

Vienna University of Technology, Austria

A Min Tjoa is since 1994 director of the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently also the head of the Austrian Competence Center for Security Research. He received his PhD in Engineering from the University of Linz, Austria in 1979. He was Visiting Professor at the Universities of Zurich, Kyushu and Wroclaw, and at the Technical Universities of Prague and Lausanne. From 1999 to 2003 he was the president of the Austrian Computer Society. He is member of the IFIP Technical Committee for Information Systems and vice-chairman of the IFIP Working Group on Enterprise Information Systems.

He has served as chairman of several international conferences including the IEEE Int. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, European Software Engineering Conference, ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, the International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies. He is Honorary Chairman of the International Conference on Very Large Databases 2007.

His current research focus areas are e-Commerce, Data Warehousing, Grid Computing, Semantic Web, Security, and Personal Information Management Systems. He has published more than 150 peer reviewed articles in journals and conferences. He is author and editor of 15 books.

Title of presentation: Security Issues for the Use of Semantic Web in e-Commerce [abstract]

Invited talks for TCGOV 2007

Andreas Abecker

Karlsruhe University, Germany

Dr. Andreas Abecker manages together with Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer the "Knowledge Management and Semantic Technologies" team within FZI, Karlsruhe University's technology transfer organization for information and communication technologies. He has about ten years experience in technology transfer, application-oriented research and R&D management in areas such as Expert Systems in technical domains, Data, Text, and Web Usage Mining, and Business-process Oriented and Agent-Based Knowledge Management.

In his lab, about 20 Ph.D. students, software enginers and postdocs, currently work on topics such as ontology-based information integration and interoperability, social software and Web2.0, knowledge management (KM) in software engineering, semantic middleware (web services, grid systems), etc.

The team ran (and is still running) a series of three subsequent European research projects about semantics and KM in eGovernment (the OntoGov, FIT and SAKE projects). In his talk, Dr. Abecker will give an overview of the potential benefits of semantic technologies in eGovernment.

Andreas Rapp

Career in local administration since 1990, Dr. iuris (Salzburg 1994), Master Européen en Médiation (CH Sion 2002); from 2001 onward director of local administration (town hall) in Voecklabruck - an Austrian town of 13.000 inhabitants; an organization employing 220 persons and facing 37 political representatives headed by the mayor; highly interested in state of the art ICT technologies, regularly attending conferences on related topics, contributing to the development of E-Government on several levels, whenever possible; firmly believing in Europe and the possibility to resolve problems peacefully on all levels.

Abstracts

John Domingue: Semantic Web Services and Business Processes: Approaches and Applications

In this talk I will describe two related EU Integrated Projects: DIP and SUPER. DIP was a three year project, which finished at the end of 2006, involving 20 partners which addressed the topic of applying Semantic Web technology to support the development of business applications through the reuse of Web Services. The main results of DIP comprised the Web Services Modelling Ontology (WSMO) and a reference architecture for semantic execution environments which is currently being standardised through OASIS. In the talk I will illustrate the DIP approach through one of our use cases in eGovernment. Within this use case we developed a system which supports emergency planners at Essex County Council by combining the DIP platform with the Google Maps API.

SUPER is a three year project involving 19 partners which started in Spring 2006. The aim of SUPER is to combine Semantic Web Services and Business Process Modelling to enable business experts to directly manage enterprise processes which reside in ICT systems without recourse to IT staff. During the talk I will outline the SUPER approach which is based upon a 4-layer framework underpinned by a stack of ontologies.

Relevant URLs:
DIP - http://dip.semanticweb.org/
eMerges - http://irs-test.open.ac.uk/sgis-dev/
SUPER - http://www.ip-super.org/

Alois Ferscha: Digital Artefacts

Pervasive Computing has postulated to invisibly integrate technology into everyday objects in such a way, that these objects turn into smart things. Not only a single object of this kind is supposed to represent the interface among the "physical world of atoms" and the "digital world of bits", but a whole landscapes of them. As an approach to link each artefact in the physical world with the software objects in the digital world we propose stick-on solutions - Digital Artefacts - as the symbiosis of technology rich artefacts and a P2P based coor-dination framework.

A spatial proximity based spontaneous interaction approach for "shared nothing" P2P systems has been developed and imple-mented in our P2P coordination framework. Mobile peers, once in spatial proximity to each other, coordinate their activities based on the exchange and analysis of self descriptions in metadata format. Each peer individually conducts a similarity analysis of the role and profile data received from other peers in vicinity, and invokes triggers if a certain similarity threshold is reached.

I will present aspects of the underlying profile description language expressing peer preferences with respect to the particular context in which the interaction is attempted (like time, geoposition, owner, environmental conditions, etc.), the mathematical formulation of similarity metrics and the matching analysis of semistructured data, the mechanisms for consensus finding and coordination in peer ensembles, and the component model within which the framework is implemented. Findings will be demonstrated in scenarios involving our "Digital Artefact" miniaturized hardware platform, serving as a stick-on solution for artefacts.

Wei-Ying Ma: Building Infrastructure for Web-scale Data Mining

To accelerate Web innovation, we found it necessary to build an infrastructure to provide large-scale data processing and data management capabilities.

In this talk, I will introduce WebStudio, an infrastructure we have constructed to facilitate the development and experimentation with new data mining algorithms for improving Web search. Some new search technologies developed from this infrastructure will be also demonstrated.

Wasim Sadiq: Have BPMS delivered for Processes like DBMS have for Data?

Business process management systems (BPMS) have been around for more than a decade. Their promise has been to separate the process logic from applications and to manage it at a separate software layer just like database management systems (DBMS) have been used to manage data. Today, there is hardly any enterprise application that does not depend on DBMS technology. However, even after many years of research, development, standardization and major product offerings, BPMS have not lived up to their promise and potential. In this talk, I will highlight some of the strengths of BPMS that in fact are also hindering their wide spread utilization in enterprise applications. I will also discuss some potential ideas to overcome these shortcomings.

A Min Tjoa: Security Issues for the Use of Semantic Web in e-Commerce

The goal of the presentation is to describe innovative methods to secure future Semantic Web based e-Commerce approaches. Therefore new security concepts and methods, capable of handling semantics, have to be developed.

The following main areas need special security considerations in a semantic environment:

Security ontology / Security within ontologies: Ontologies require a dual security approach. On one hand, a specific security ontology will constitute an own security domain. This will help to integrate security concepts properly in the early stages of the architecture. This way, security will not be simply added as an afterthought. This often happens in similar architecture development, usually leaving critical weaknesses in the systems which are difficult to overcome. The integrated Error sub-ontology is used to classify system errors regarding to their security exposure.

On the other hand, security within ontologies is an interesting topic. It might be necessary to restrict the access to the ontology itself - depending on the real world application - or it might be useful to enforce special types of access control restraints represented in the ontology. In most cases ontologies are used to store important and confidential data and so it is necessary to protect the ontology against unauthorized access.

Trust Issues regarding communicating parties will be presented. In some scenarios, such as in environments where sensitive data may be handled, establishing valid trust relationships during the negotiation phase will be a crucial aspect. Representing the confidentiality requirements of the CIA triad (i.e. confidentiality, integrity and availability), the trust issues must be treated with special attention, especially if the frameworks' agents are supposed to negotiate and exchange data automatically or semi-automatically.