INVITED SPEAKERS

Moira Norrie

PIM meets Web 2.0

Web 2.0 has been adopted as a term to refer to a new generation of web applications specifically designed to support collaboration and the sharing of user-generated content. However, these applications are increasingly being used, not just to share personal information, but also to manage it. For example, a user might use Facebook to manage their photos and personal contacts, a networking site such as LinkedIn to manage professional contacts and various project Wiki sites to manage and share information about publications and presentations. As a result, personal data and its management become fragmented, not only across desktop applications, but also between desktop applications and various Web 2.0 applications. We will look at personal information management (PIM) issues in the realm of Web 2.0, showing how the respective communities might profit from each other.

BIO:

Moira C. Norrie is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich where she leads the Global Information Systems ( GlobIS ) research group. She studied in her home country of Scotland , obtaining a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Dundee , an MSc in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Glasgow .

Moira's research and teaching focuses on the use of object-oriented and web technologies for next generation information systems. In the early 1990s, she developed the OM model of data which supports an extended entity-relationship approach to data management in object-oriented systems. Since then a number of OMS systems and frameworks have been developed within her group based on the OM model. The latest is OMS Avon which is a semantic data management layer for db4o. A common goal of many research projects is to investigate how object databases can be empowered to support novel forms of interaction and information sharing.

Oscar Pastor

Conceptual Modeling meets the Human Genome

If we look at the past, it makes sense to argue on the strong value that Conceptual Modeling has provided to Information Systems Design and Development. If we look at the present, we see how the most advanced Software Engineering approaches -oriented to produce software with the required quality- use extensively models under the acronyms of Model Driven Development (MDD), Model-Based Code Generation (MBCD), Model-Driven Architectures (MDA), etc. Nowadays, Conceptual Modeling is widely used in the Information Systems domain. If we look at the future, we could wonder what kind of new domains of application could become more challenging for Conceptual Modeling. Concretely, the Bioinformatics domain in general, and the understanding of the Human Genome in particular are currently considered to be first-order issues, where the role of Conceptual Modeling is curiously not fully exploited yet. Considering the continous and increasing interest that this domain generates, to analyze how Conceptual Modeling principles, methods and techniques could help to improve the current ways of facing the problem and how Conceptual Modeling could help to provide more efficient solutions, is an extremely attractive topic. To introduce and discuss these ideas will be the basic goal of this keynote. Focusing on the Human Genome seen as a representation of some Conceptual Model, analogies around the main Model-Driven Software Development conventional principles and the problem of accomplishing a precise interpretation of the Human Genome will be analyzed. Current and future scenarios based on these ideas will be introduced. If Conceptual Modeling is being effective in providing a sound linkage between concepts and their associated software representation -facilitating to understand where programs, seen as conceptual model representations, come from-, why not concluding that Conceptual Modeling should be equaly effective to understand the Human Genome seen as a representation of a Conceptual Model by extracting the concepts that rely behind it? As the interpretation of the Human Genome is a big challenge for the scientific community, the use of Conceptual Modeling-based notions and methods to undertake this problem will open exciting scenarios to look for more efficient scientific strategies, with their corresponding set of original solutions, tools and subsequent practical applications.

BIO:

Prof. Dr. Óscar Pastor
Professor of Computer Science at Facultad de Informática (FI).
Head of the Dpt . Sistemas Informáticos y Computación.
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia , Spain .
SAB President

Bio : PhD in 1992. Former researcher in HP Labs, currently Full Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain , Director of the Department of Information Systems and Computation, and leader of the OO-Method Research Group, including 35 researchers. Author of over 100 research papers in conference proceedings, journals and books in the area of Information Systems and Software Engineering, he is member of the Editorial Board of journals as IJWET (“International Journal on Web Engineering and Technology”, Inderscience), JWE (“Journal of Web Engineering”, Rinton Press), the “International Kluwer Series on Human-Computer Interaction” (Kluwer Academics Publishers), and Requirements Engineering Journal (Springer) among others, and member / president of the Scientific Program Commitee of relevant International Conferences as ER, CAiSE, RE, ADBIS, WWW,.DEXA, EC-WEB, WER, IDEAS, ICEIS, eCOMO, ICWE, CADUI, DSV-IS, etc. Additionally, he is a regular reviewer of national and international research projects, and leader of several national and international research projects. He has received numerous research grants from public institutions and private industry, putting into practice sound links between academia and industry. His r esearch activities focus on conceptual modelling , requirements engineering, information systems design and development, web engineering and model-based software production.

Creater of the OASIS object-oriented,formal specification language and its corresponding software production method called the OO-METHOD, he is the leader of the R&D project behind CARE Technologies, undertaken since 1996 by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and Consoft S.A ., that has originated an advanced MDA-based Conceptual Model Compiler called OlivaNova, a tool that produces a final software product starting from a Conceptual Schema where the system requirements are represented. Within this tool scope, he is currently responsible of the research team working from the University on the improvement of the underlying framework, focusing on Business Process Modeling, Web Technologies and how to use properly Software and Arquitectural Patterns to go from the problem space to the solution space in an automated way.

Research area: Conceptual Modeling, Model-Driven Development, Web Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering.

Amit Sheth

Relationship Web: Spinning the Web from Trailblazing to Semantic Analytics

Dr. Vannevar Bush outlined his vision for Memex in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Describing how the human brain navigates an information space in what he called trailblazing, Dr. Bush said, “It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” Now that we can label content with associated meaning (semantics), using the techniques of information extraction, we can develop an interactive, human-directed, semantic browsing environment in which analysts can explore heterogeneous content from disparate sources in a kind of stream-of-consciousness, identifying one item of interest and then following contextually relevant links to another. A complementary form of analysis that is now possible is to specify a complex hypothesis, break it down into different pieces, and look for evidence to match parts of the hypothesis.

In current Semantic Web research, longstanding work in IR, information extraction, NLP, statistical NLP, graph and query processing, among other techniques, is paired with conceptual modeling, knowledge representation and populated ontologies (schemas in semantically rich models and associated fact/knowledge base) for the following activities that process all varieties of data: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured/text:

• Extraction of entities and relationships (which form the semantic annotation or labeling of data—a key characteristic of Semantic Web) and their representation in RDF, which models named relationships (predicated in triples of the form (subject, predicate, object);
• Subgraph extraction, path computations (semantic associations discovery), similarity, causality and other pattern discovery;
• Support for higher-order activities including semantic search and querying, semantic browsing, reasoning, analysis, hypothesis evaluation, discovery, explanation, question-answering and visualization

In this talk we will discuss some of these capabilities in the context of evolving a Relationship. What metadata, annotation, and labeling are to the Semantic Web, relationships of all forms (implicit, explicit, and formal) are to the Relationship Web. The Relationship Web organizes Web resources for analysis that goes beyond better search and data integration to trailblazing, discovery of complex relationships and hypothesis evaluation, leading to deeper insights and better decision making. We will also discuss several examples from the domains for biomedical research, health care and semantic sensor web that have been developed or are being developed in collaboration with the scientists and users.

BIO:

Amit P. Sheth is a Researcher, Educator and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Knowledge Enabled Information and Services (Kno.e.sis) Center (http://knoesis.wright.edu) at the Wright State University, and an IEEE Fellow. Earlier he founded and directed the LSDIS lab at the University of Georgia, and worked at Bellcore, Unisys and Honeywell.

With h-index of 50 and over 12,000 citations, areas of his publication impact include the Semantic Web, services computing (esp. Semantic Web Services), workflow management, and information integration (esp. federated databases). He has founded and led two companies- first in the area of workflow management (Infocosm, 1996) and the second based on development/use of ontologies and semantic search/analysis technologies (Taalee/Voquette/Semagix, 1999), and his research and leadership resulted in several commercial products and many deployed applications in health care practice, biomedical research, financial services, and defense-intelligence. He is also the Editor in Chief (EIC) of International Journal ohttp://www.ijswis.org/http://www.ijswis.org/n Semantic Web and Information Systems, a co-EIC of Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, an editorial boad member of several journals including IEEE Internet Computing, and series co-editor of two Spinger book series in Semantic Web and databases areas.