University of Konstanz
Database & Information Systems Group
Prof. Marc H. Scholl

Web Services and Semantic Web

News

[11.10.2007] Seminarvorbesprechung
The introduction to all DBIS seminars (Vorbesprechung) has been scheduled on Tuesday, October, 23th 2007, at 10:15 a.m. in room C 252. If you fail to attend it, get in touch with Svetlana Mansmann.

[24.10.2007] Begin of the talk sessions
The talks will be held weekly starting from November, 27 2007. All participants are expected to attend each talk.

[31.01.2008] Closing of the seminar
The series of seminar presentations finished on Tuesday, January 29th 2008. The deadline for submitting the course papers (Ausarbeitung) is February, 29th 2008.

Schedule

Recurring Events

One-time Events

Talks

Introduction into the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. At its core, the semantic web comprises a philosophy, a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that have yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

presented by Andrea Söter

Web 3.0: the end of Google?

The Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) promises to organize the world's information in a dramatically more logical way than Google can ever achieve with their current engine design. The Semantic Web requires the use of a declarative ontological language like OWL to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and make new conclusions, not simply match keywords. The emergence of a Wikipedia 3.0 that is built on the Semantic Web model will herald the end of Google as the Ultimate Answer Machine. It will be replaced with "WikiMind" which will not be a mere search engine like Google is but a true Global Brain: a powerful pan-domain inference engine, with a vast set of ontologies (a la Wikipedia 3.0) covering all domains of human knowledge, that can reason and deduce answers instead of just throwing raw information at you using the outdated concept of a search engine.

presented by Eduard Schibrowski

Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web

This talk gives some background on the term "Ontology" and explains the key role of of ontologies in the semantic web. It proceeds by providing a categorization of semantic languages on the web. Two major ontology language standards, RDFs and OWL, both developed by W3C, are detailed. It is demonstrated how the Web Ontology Language OWL overcomes major disadvantages of RDFS. OWL is presented as a successor of RDFS and an emerding web ontology language standard recommended by W3C.

OWL: A Description Logic Based Ontology Language

This talk gives an introduction to the description logics (DL) and the DL-based web ontology language OWL developed by the Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group of W3C. It demonstrates the benefits of the ontology reasoning and elaborates on the algorithms for its implementation. Enumeration of the current research challenges in the field concludes the presentation.

presented by Florian Leitner

Data modelling versus Ontology engineering

Ontologies in current computer science parlance are computer based resources that represent agreed domain semantics. Unlike data models, the fundamental asset of ontologies is their relative independence of particular applications, i.e. an ontology consists of relatively generic knowledge that can be reused by different kinds of applications/tasks. The first part of this talk concerns some aspects that help to understand the differences and similarities between ontologies and data models. In the second part an ontology engineering framework that supports and favours the genericity of an ontology is presented.

presented by Ketevan Karbelashvili

Finding and Ranking Knowledge on the Semantic Web

Swoogle helps software agents and knowledge engineers find Semantic Web knowledge encoded in RDF and OWL documents on the Web. Navigating such a Semantic Web on the Web is difficult due to the paucity of explicit hyperlinks beyond the namespaces in URIrefs and the few inter-document links like rdfs:seeAlso and owl:imports. This talk presents a novel Semantic Web navigation model providing additional navigation paths through Swoogle's search services such as the Ontology Dictionary. Algorithms have been developed for ranking the importance of Semantic Web objects at three levels of granularity: documents, terms and RDF graphs. Experiments show that Swoogle outperforms conventional web search engine and other ontology libraries in finding more ontologies, ranking their importance, and thus promoting the use and emergence of consensus ontologies.

presented by Patrice Matthias Brend'amour

Semantic Browsing of Digital Collections

Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor's interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. This talk describes a solution based on the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed.

presented by Rodney Rehm

Semantic Web Mining

Semantic Web Mining aims at combining the two fast-developing research areas Semantic Web and Web Mining. Web Mining aims at discovering insights about the meaning of Web resources and their usage. Given the primarily syntactical nature of data Web mining operates on, the discovery of meaning is impossible based on these data only. Therefore, formalizations of the semantics of Web resources and navigation behavior are increasingly being used. This fits exactly with the aims of the Semantic Web: the Semantic Web enriches the WWW by machine-processable information which supports the user in his tasks. The idea is to improve, on the one hand, the results of Web Mining by exploiting the new semantic structures in the Web; and to make use of Web Mining, on the other hand, for building up the Semantic Web. This talk gives an overview of where the two areas meet today, and sketches ways of how a closer integration could be profitable.

presented by Diana Cerbu

Introduction to Web Services

Web services are a new breed of Web applications. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes...Once a Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web services) can discover and invoke the deployed service. This talk gives an overview of the Web SErvices Platform and its underlying technologies (XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, XAML,XLANG, XKMS, XFS).

presented by Andreas Weiler

XML, Web Services and the Data Revolution

XML is a disruptive technology: one that has already upset the balance of power throughout the technology industry, and offers organizations powerful opportunities for competitive advantage. This talk focuses on the real value of XML, and the new Web services paradigm it has spawned. To understand XML's impact, it's helpful to look at XML in the context of three revolutions centered on XML and the Web. These include a revolution in how we think about and use data, a revolution in software architecture that has moved us from tightly coupled networks to a more loosely coupled, open Web space, and a revolution in how we build complex software.

presented by Suat Sayar

Web Services Architecture: Concepts and Relationships

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. This talk is intended to provide a common definition of a Web service, and define its place within a larger Web services framework. The WSA provides a conceptual model and a context for understanding Web services and the relationships between the components of this model. The architecture does not attempt to specify how Web services are implemented, and imposes no restriction on how Web services might be combined. The Web services architecture is an interoperability architecture: it identifies those global elements of the global Web services network that are required in order to ensure interoperability between Web services.

presented by Florian Kratschmann

Web Services Architecture: Stakeholder's Perspective

This presentation examines the web services architecture from various perspectives, each perspective representing one coherent view of the architecture. The main perspectives include the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), web services technologies and usage, web service discovery, semantics, security, reliability, management, and interaction.

presented by Roman Rädle

Semantic Web Enabled Web Services

Web Services in their current state are insufficient to address real semantic interoperability. It is argued that enriching Web Services with Semantic Web technologies like ontology support will result in real interoperable web services termed Semantic Web enabled Web Services (SWWS). The Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF) is introduced that defines the necessary concepts for SWWS providing maximal de-coupling, scalable mediation and support for behavior level. An architecture implementing the components necessary to deploy SWWS is introduced.

presented by David Spretke

Semantically-enabled Service Oriented Architecture

Semantically enabled service-oriented architecture focused on principles of service orientation, semantic modeling, intelligent and automated integration defines grounds for a cutting-edge technology which enables new means to integration of services, more adaptive to changes in business requirements which occur over systems' lifetime. This talk defines the architecture starting from a global perspective and through Web service modeling ontology as its semantic service model, narrowing down to its services, processes and technology useed for the reference implementation. On a B2B integration scenario several aspects of the architecture are demonstrated, followed by an evaluation of the implementation according to a community-agreed standard evaluation methodology for semantic-based systems.

presented by Sebastian Kay Belle

Coping with Heterogeneous Interaction Patterns in Web Services

This talk describes how we handle heterogeneity in web service interaction through a choreography mechanism. IRS-III is a framework and platform for developing semantic web services which utilizes the WSMO ontology. The overall design of the choreography framework is based on: the use of ontologies and state, IRS-III playing the role of a broker, differentiating between communication direction and which actor has the initiative, having representations which can be executed, a formal semantics, and the ability to suspend communication. The framework has a full implementation, which is illustrated through an example application.

presented by Cristian Di Panfilo

Material

Seminar Description

Semantic Web (SW) and Web Services (WS) are two interwoven aspects of application integration, responsible for the integration at the data and at the program/machine level, respectively. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners.

Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The Semantic Web is based on two major concepts: 1) common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, referred to as RDF (Resource Description Framework), 2) a language for recording how the data relates to real world objects, denoted Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility, as well as their machine-processable descriptions thanks to the use of XML. They can be combined in a loosely coupled way in order to achieve complex operations. Programs providing simple services can interact with each other in order to deliver sophisticated added-value services.

A recent trend of converging SW with WS is hase give a rise to Semantic Web Services (SWS) , which combine the two technologies to enable maximal automation and dynamism in all aspects of Web service provision and use, including (but not limited to) discovery, selection, composition, negotiation, invocation, monitoring and recovery.

Participants of this seminar will get acquainted with the overall frameworks for SW, WS, and SWS, their underlying concepts, standards and enabling technologies. We will deepen our understanding of this emerging paradigm by studying its theoretical foundations, research challenges, as well as related industrial and commercial effords.

Addressees:

Bachelor- und master students of the Information Engineering course as well as interested students from other departments.

Credit Points:

Subject to successful participation (presence, preparation, presentation, and a written survey) 4 credits (Angewandte Informatik, Informatik der Systeme) can be obtained.

Contacts