Time: Tuesday, May 8 (full-day, 8:30am to 5:30pm)
Location: Empress
Abstract:
Robust management of distributed ontologies and metadata is an important topic of research and development in distributed applications, since the use of explicit knowledge and metadata underpins sharing and brings interoperation, flexibility and extensibility to them. These topics have been addressed by researchers in the Semantic Grid area, which is defined as an extension of the current Grid where information and services are given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. System development in this area has evolved from a set of pioneer applications, with little systematic development, to a phase of systematic investigation, where more logical, consistent and ordered approaches are applied and where know-how transfer to middleware and applications has started.
The goal of this tutorial is to provide the attendees with both theoretical foundations and hands-on experience of robust semantic-aware middleware for the management of ontologies and metadata. In particular, attendees will:
The contents of the tutorial will be organised around six sessions. About half of them will be theoretical (2.5 hours) and the other half practical (4 hours). People who are only interested in the theoretical sessions should express this after registering, in order to plan the logistics of the hands-on tutorial adequately.
Prerequisite Knowledge:
For those who wish to participate only in the theoretical sessions, there are no prerequisites.
For those participating in the hands-on sessions, our recommendation is that they should have some background on ontology markup languages (RDF Schema, and OWL), metadata languages (RDF) and basic notions of distributed systems. Besides, knowledge of Grid middleware platforms such as Globus Toolkit, UNICORE or EGEE gLite is an advantage, but not necessary.
Finally, due to the hands-on nature of the tutorial, attendees will need to bring their own laptops and will have to install (previous to the tutorial) several software packages that will be provided at least one month in advance.
Presenters:
Pinar Alper is a Research Associate working within the Information Management Group (IMG) at the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester. She currently participates in the EU FP6 IST project OntoGrid (FP6-511513), and has participated in UK e-Science pilot project myGrid. Her research work focuses on application of semantics in the areas of Web Services and the service oriented Grid.
Oscar Corcho is working as a Marie Curie fellow at the Information Management Group of the University of Manchester. His research activities include the Semantic Grid, the Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering. Currently he participates at the EU FP6 IST project OntoGrid (FP6-511513). He has published the books "Ontological Engineering" and "A layered declarative approach to ontology translation with knowledge preservation", and over 30 journal and conference and workshop papers.
Miguel Esteban is a member of the Ontology Engineering Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. His research activities are focused in Ontological Engineering issues, especially in ontology usage (access and management) in Grid environments, and ontology evolution in distributed and heterogeneous environments. Nowadays, in the OntoGrid project he is leading the development of WS-DAIOnt-RDF(S), a specification for RDF(S) model-based access in the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). This work is the basis of the DAIS RDF(S) Access activity that is taking place in the DAIS WG of the OGF, in which he is also participating, taking the leadership in the development of the model-based part of the specification.
Sean Bechhofer is a Lecturer in the Information Management Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. His research interests lie in the development and use of knowledge representation technology to support what is now commonly known as the Semantic Web. He has been involved in the development of languages, applications, editors, parsers, APIs and interfaces to support the use of Description Logic (DL) and knowledge representation technology and was responsible for OilEd, one of the first ontology development tools to utilise a DL reasoner. Sean also has interests in hypermedia -- through the COHSE project Sean was involved in marrying together hypermedia and semantics, producing an early example of a Semantic Web system.
Carole Goble is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and co-leads the IMG group since 1997. Her research interests are on the accessibility of information, particularly the use of terminological and ontological services for the representation and classification of metadata in a range of application domains. Her recent work has been focused on two major areas: the Semantic Web and e-Science/Grids, and has been instrumental in an effort to link the two areas by the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Grid and e-Science, a fusion dubbed the Semantic Grid. She is co-chair of the Open Grid Forum Semantic Grid Research Group.
David De Roure is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, where he leads the Department's Grid and Pervasive Computing activities. A founding member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, his current research interest is the application of advanced knowledge technologies to both Grid and pervasive computing. He has a leading international role in Semantic Grid research, is involved in the UK e-Science programme and European Grid activities, and is a member of the Steering Group of the Global Grid Forum. David has worked for many years with distributed information systems and has also been active in the Web and hypertext communities.
