Workshop on
Middleware for the Semantic Web: Towards Knowledge in the Cloud

http://events.sti-innsbruck.at/msw-icsc2009/

At the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
http://icsc.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsc/

Berkeley, CA, USA - September 14-16, 2009

========================================================================

WORKSHOP INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES
====================================

The Semantic Web is about giving meaning to artifacts on the Web by annotating
objects, persons and locations or by linking them to terms formalized in
ontologies. The Semantic Web is however first and foremost about making links
between all those artifacts, in order to allow humans and machines to explore
the Web of data.

While technologies to annotate artifacts, and to create and use ontologies have
made amazing progress over the last few years, and have reached maturity in
many respects, it is still unclear how the federated Web of linked data can be
created along the lines of the Web's core architecture: identification of
resources, simplicity, openness and globality. The Web is a huge distributed
information space for documents, multimedia files and databases; we expect the
Semantic Web to become the globally distributed information space for linked
resources. In order for this expectation to materialize, additional research
and development is required in order to enable coordinated access to linked
data of millions, even billions, of knowledge and service providers.
Technological solutions that pay tribute to the eminent open challenges of
scalability, interoperability, dynamism and openness must be realized, without
forgetting about privacy, trust and security concerns. As stated recently by
Kingsley Idehen, Founder & CEO of OpenLink Software: "Enterprises and
individual Web users currently struggle with data portability, accessibility,
and privacy challenges, arising from exponentially growing data across
disparate data sources".

Besides the aforementioned technological challenges with respect to linked data
on the Web, we need tools and techniques that simplify the accessibility to
distributed data, facilitate the integration of dispersed data, and lower the
entry barriers to the global Semantic Web for enterprises and Internet users.
In summary, we see the need for a virtualization layer that abstracts from the
complexity of the Web of linked data, i.e. the Semantic Web, in terms of
physical storage, access management, trust and provenance of data, or
distributed query processing. A complementary step in that direction is taken
by the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum in terms of the Unified Cloud
Interface that has the goal to create an API for and about other API's. RDF is
exploited to describe a semantic cloud data model which makes the cloud
interfaces vendor independent and reusable. This is another recent example of
how semantic technology and cloud computing converge.

In consequence, the workshop focuses on middleware solutions for the Semantic
Web that show cloud computing capabilities such as dynamic scalability,
virtualized resources, and abstraction from technological details. In terms of
the Semantic Web, we are thus looking for contributions towards middleware
solutions and deployment mechanism for the integration of highly distributed
knowledge bases emerging from the world of linked data.

The workshop shall bring together promising cutting-edge cloud- respectively
semantic computing research, which in integration address the aforementioned
challenges and deliver fundamental constructs to form a new semantic middleware
layer for the truly global Semantic Web. The workshop addresses the traditional
issues of data and process heterogeneity with a clear focus on large-scale,
open and distributed environments.

TOPICS AND APPLICATIONS
=======================
We welcome original academia and industry papers or project descriptions that
propose innovative approaches to build a semantic middleware layer for the Web.

The topics of interest of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

* Extensions to existing middleware such as Web services, GRID, tuplespaces,
message oriented middleware with semantic technologies

* Software architecture and software engineering techniques for building semantic
middleware

* The usage of ontologies and reasoning in relation with middleware technologies

* Techniques and approaches to distributed reasoning on the cloud

* Tools and techniques to enable virtualization and abstraction for accessing
linked data

* Technologies for the integration and interoperability of semantic artifacts
in the large

* Mechanisms for provenance and trust management

* Methods and techniques to increase reliability and availability of semantic
middleware

* Monitoring methods and infrastructures for the cloud

* Practical experiences in using semantic middleware to realize the Web of
linked data, service-oriented architectures, or knowledge engineering systems

* Deployment perspectives for future semantic middleware

* Studies on existing and emerging target markets for semantically enabled
middleware


IMPORTANT DATES
===============
Submission Deadline: June 5, 2009
Notification: June 26, 2009
Camera-Ready & Registration: tba


SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
==========================
Authors should submit a 6-page paper in double-column IEEE format following the
submission guidelines available on the ICSC2009 Web site
(http://icsc.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsc/). All workshop papers will be included in
the IEEE conference proceedings.


ORGANIZERS
==========
Elena Simperl Semantic Technology Institute - University of Innsbruck, Austria
Reto Krummenacher Semantic Technology Institute - University of Innsbruck, Austria
Carlos Pedrinaci Knowledge Media Institute - The Open University, United Kingdom
Benny Rochwerger IBM Haifa Labs, Israel

CONTACT
=======
Reto Krummenacher
University of Innsbruck (Semantic Technology Institute)
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
E reto.krummenacher@sti-innsbruck.at
T +43 512 507 6452
F +43 512 507 9872
F +43 512 507 9872