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keynotes　

Karl Aberer, Switzerland.

Keynote title: Structure and Dynamics of Emergent Semantics Systems

Karl Aberer is a Professor for Distributed Information Systems at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, and director of the Swiss National Centre for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS). His research interests are on decentralization and self-organization in information systems with applications in peer-to-peer search, overlay networks, trust management and mobile and sensor networks. Before joining EPFL in 2000 he was leading the research division of open adaptive information systems at the Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, which he joined in 1992. There his work concentrated on XML data management and cross-organizational workflows. He studied mathematics at ETH Zürich where he also completed his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science in 1991. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is member of several journal editorial boards, including VLDB Journal, and conference steering comittees. Recently he served as PC co-chair of ICDE 2005, MDM 2006 and WISE 2006.

Structure and Dynamics of Emergent Semantics Systems

Speaker: Karl Aberer, EPFL

Until recently, most data interoperability techniques involved central components, e.g., global schemas or ontologies, to overcome semantic heterogeneity for enabling transparent access to heterogeneous data sources. Today, however, with the democratization of tools facilitating knowledge elicitation in machine- processable formats, one cannot rely on global, centralized schemas anymore as knowledge creation and consumption are getting more and more dynamic and decentralized. Peer Data Management Systems (PDMS) implementing semantic overlay networks are a good example of this new breed of systems eliminating the central semantic component and replacing it through decentralized processes of local schema alignment and query processing. As a result semantic interoperability becomes an emergent property of a self-organizing system.

In this talk we provide examples of both structural and dynamic aspects of emergent semantics systems based on semantic overlay networks. From the structural perspective we can show that some of the typical properties of self- organizing networks also appear in semantic overlay networks. They form directed, scale-free graphs. We present both analytical models for characterizing those graphs and empirical results providing insight on their quantitative properties. From the dynamic perspective we present semantic gossiping, a model for the dynamic reorganisation of semantic overlay networks resulting from information propagation through the network and local realignment of semantic relationships. The techniques we apply in that context are based on belief propagation, a distributed probabilistic reasoning technique frequently encountered in self- organizing systems. Finally we will give a quick glance on how this techniques can be implemented at the systems level, based on a peer-to-peer systems approach and on future applications of these techniques in the context of the Sensor Internet.

Implications of Web 2.0 for the Semantic Grid

Speaker: Geoffrey Fox

Web 2.0 is characterized by blogs, wikis, mashups and hundreds of websites supporting social exchanges including tagged bookmarks, pictures and personal profiles. This supports universal simple approaches to publication, composition of services and a rich metadata system for adorning URL's and people. The Semantic Grid has related goals but is typically implemented with tools and capabilities of much greater sophistication but with less elegant and robust implementations. It appears interesting to base Semantic Grids on Web2.0 technology as this will facilitate adoption and support. We explore this idea.

Theme Talk:

Completeness of Query Operations on Resource Spaces

Speaker: Hai Zhuge

Abstract: A great variety of languages can be designed by different people for different purposes to operate resource spaces. Two fundamental issues are: can we design more operations in addition to existing operations? and, how many operations are sufficient or necessary? This talk solves these problems by investigating the theoretical basis for determining how complete a selection capability is provided in a resource operation sublanguage independent of any host language. The result is very useful to the design and analysis of operating languages.

Use of the Language Grid for Collaborative Work

Speaker: Toru Ishida
Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan

Abstract:

To increase the accessibility and usability of online language services, this talk proposes the language grid to create composite language services for various intercultural collaborative works. The language grid is called "horizontal," when the grid connects the standard languages, or "vertical," when the grid combines the language services generated by communities. Even though language resources will become easy to use, we still lack a complete understanding of how machine translation affects collaboration. Using a machine translation embedded chat system, we investigated eight pairs from three different language communities, China, Korea, and Japan, working on referential tasks in their shared second language (English) and in their native languages. The result reveals further research issues on machine translation mediated collaboration.

Biography:

Toru Ishida is a professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University. Until 1993, he was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories. He spent some time at Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Le Laboratoire d'Informatique, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies of University of Maryland, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Computer Science and Technology Department of Tsinghua University as a visiting scholar/professor. He is an IEEE fellow from 2002. His professional services include an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, an associate editor of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, a co-editor in chief of Elsevier Journal on Web Semantics, a program co-chair of International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS'96), and a general co-chair of the first international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'02).