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Advances in Semantics for Web services 2008 (semantics4ws 2008)

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“BPM 2.0 - Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet BPM:Semantics in Business and Scientific Processes”

Workshop at the Sixth International Conference on Business Process Management(BPM 2008)

Milan, Italy,

1-4 September 2008

Advances in Semantics for Web services 2008 (semantics4ws 2008)

The theme of semantics4ws 2008 is “BPM 2.0 - Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet BPM: Semantics in Business and Scientific Processes”.

Goals and Content of the Workshop

Web services have added a new level of functionality to the current Web by taking a first step towards seamless integration of distributed software components using Web standards. Current Web service technologies around SOAP, WSDL and UDDI operate at a syntactic level and, therefore, although they support interoperability (i.e. interoperability between the many diverse application development platforms that exist today) through common standards, they still require human interaction to a large extent. For example, both the process of finding a relevant service or of mediating data that needs to be exchanged between the services require significant manual work. To address these and other limitations, a community of researchers have been working on Semantic Web Services (SWS) since 2001.  This research draws upon a variety of fields such as Semantic Web, knowledge representation, formal methods, software engineering, process modelling, workflow, and software agents. A key objective of SWS has been to automate Web services-related tasks, like discovery, publication, selection, composition, mediation, monitoring, invocation, and adaptation, whereby the use of semantics increases the degree of automation. SWS community has been enriched by a number of large group projects and initiatives, like OWL-S, METEOR-S, WSMO, WSDL-S, IRS, has resulted in four submissions to W3C and the first W3C recommendation on semantics for Web services, Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL). This is complemented by an increasing number of open source tools, use cases and prototypical applications.  At least 10 workshops related to SWS have been held at ICWS, BPM, ICSOC, WWW and other conferences. In fact, this proposal is for the fifth workshop in a series. 

This workshop will provide a forum in which to focus on selected core technical challenges for deployment of Semantic Web Services and SAWSDL and reach a better understanding of the relationships between commercial Web service standards, SAWSDL, current SWS research efforts, recent proposals of SA-REST and semantic policy descriptions, and the ultimate requirements for full-scale deployment of these technologies. More specifically, this workshop aims to tackle the research problems (as well as recent practical experiences) around methods, concepts, models, languages and technology that enable semantics in the context of Web services, as well as discussing recent advances in semantics for Web services. Of particular interest are the architectural, technical, and developmental foundations of SWS, and showing how they combine synergistically to enable service automation on the scale required by today’s Internet-connected enterprises.  

The workshop will in particular solicit work that elaborates on the use of collaborative approaches in the annotation or ranking of services or other usages of the Web 2.0 paradigm in the the BPM community. We assume that the very same approach that we know from Web 2.0 – to work collaboratively – could enhance the results of process modeling.  

This proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry practitioners (e.g. leading modellers, architects, system vendors, open-source projects, developers, and end-users) addressing many of these issues (including recent developments in tools and techniques, and real-world implementations of SWS applications), and promote and foster a greater understanding of how semantics can assist automation in Web services, thus helping people develop and manage services more efficiently and effectively.

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List of Topics

  • Tools, middleware, case studies and applications involving or supporting SWS
  • ontologies, modelling and descriptions of quality of services (QoS), services level agreements (SLAs), and non-functional properties (NFPs) of Web services, policies, agreements and contracts related to SWS
  • formal languages for describing SWS and related aspects including QoS, SLAs, and NFPs
  • Web 2.0 techniques related to BPM
  • reasoning tasks and their complexity in SWS
  • validation and verification for Web services,
  • advertising, discovery, matchmaking, selection, brokering and data/process/protocol mediation in SWS and processes
  • composition, planning, and re-planning with SWS
  • execution and lifecycle management of SWS
  • monitoring, adaptability, and recovery strategies for SWS
  • semantics for Grid services and e-Services

These topics indicate the general focus of the workshop, however, related contributions are welcome also.


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Submissions:

The workshop invites different types of contributions: 

Submissions must be made via the Easychair account for this workshop

Deadlines

  • Paper submission deadline: 4 June 2008
  • Notification of acceptance: 27 June 2008
  • Camera ready: 6 July 2008 (strict deadline)

All contributions will be peer reviewed by a program committee that will incorporate well recognized experts in the area of semantic technologies and Web services.


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Workshop program

09:00 - 12:30 Tutorial on Semantic Business Process Management
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:30
  • Semantically Annotated EPC within Semantic Business Process Management. Agata Filipowska, Monika Kaczmarek and Sebastian Stein. (Full paper)
  • ARIS for Semantic Business Process Management. Sebastian Stein, Christian Stamber and Marwane El Kharbili. (Full paper)
  • Auto-completion of Executable Business Process Models. Ivan Markovic, Matthias Born, Christian Brelage, Daniel Pfeiffer and Ingo Weber. (Short Paper)
  • Service Discovery in Ubiquitous Environments: Approaches and Requirement for Context-Awareness. Mohamed Sellami, Samir Tata and Bruno Defude. (Short Paper)
15:30 - 16:00 Break
16:00 - 17:30
  • Ontology-based Data Mediation in BPEL (for Semantic Web Services). Joerg Nitzsche and Barry Norton. (Full paper)
  • A Framework for Dependency based Automatic Service Composition. Abrehet Mohammed Omer and A. Schill. (Short Paper)
  • Ontology-based Behavioural Reasoning for Business Processes. Barry Norton. (Full paper)

The workshop is open allowing anybody interested in semantics for Web services to participate fully in the workshop.


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Expected Attendance

The expected number of participants is around 30.

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Program Committee

(to be confirmed and extended)

  • Rama Akkiraju, IBM, USA
  • Jorge Cardoso, SAP Research, Germany
  • Sanjay Chaudhary, DA-IICT, India
  • Emilia Cimpian, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
  • Marin Dimitrov, Ontotext, Bulgaria
  • Dieter Fensel, DERI, Austria
  • Karthik Gomadam, Wright State University, USA
  • Juan Miguel Gómez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
  • Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Armin Haller, DERI, Ireland
  • Sung-Kook Han, Won Kwang University, South Korea
  • Jacek Kopecky, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
  • Michael Maximilien, IBM, USA
  • Brahim Medjahed, University of Michigan, USA
  • Adrian Mocan, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
  • Massimo Paolucci, DoCoMo Euro-Labs, Germany
  • Marc Richardson, BT, UK
  • Brahmananda Sapkota, DERI Galway, Ireland
  • James Scicluna,STI Innsbruck, Austria
  • Tony Shan, Bank of America, USA
  • Monika Solanki, De Montfort University, UK
  • Ioan Toma, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
  • Stuart Williams, HP Bristol, UK

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Previous Workshops of the Series

Two successful editions of the workshop were held in 2006 and 2007 in conjunction with the BPM conferences. Further information about the previous editions of the workshop can be found at:

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Organizing Committees

Steering Committee:

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Workshop Co-Chairs:

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Workshop Proceedings Chair:

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Publicity Chair:

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Biographies of the Members of the Organizing Committee

Witold Abramowicz is the chair of the Department of Information Systems at the Poznan University of Economics, Poland. His particular areas of interest are Information Filtering to MIS, Information Retrieval, and Applications of Knowledge Discovery in MIS. He received his M.Sc. from The Technical University of Poznan, Poland, Ph.D. from The Wroclaw Technical University, Poland and habilitation from The Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. He worked for three universities in the Switzerland and Germany for twelve years. He is an editor or co-author of fifteen books and 112 articles in various journals and conference proceedings. He chaired ten scientific international conferences and was a member of the program committees of over a hundred other conferences. Currently, professor Abramowicz is involved in three research projects in the 6th EU Framework Program. 

Steven Battle gained his PhD in the area of Constraint Satisfaction Problem solving, at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in 1996. Further research at UWE involved the development of innovative distributed systems and mobile agent technology within two EU projects; the FollowMe project (ESPRIT 25.338) and the Traffic Engineering Network Data System (TRENDS – ESPRIT 20.791). After joining Hewlett-Packard Labs in 1999 he continued this research in service-oriented computing, working on the development of e-services for print. He is currently engaged in the EU Semantic Web enabled Web Services Project, or SWWS (IST-2002-37134), and is responsible for capturing semantically enriched descriptions of web-services operated across HP. 

John Domingue is the Deputy Director of the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, UK. He has published over 80 refereed articles in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction; he is involved in a number of projects and is currently a Co Principle Investigator on the UK EPSRC funded Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project, the Scientific Director of the EU funded Integrated Project on Semantic Web Services DIP, and a chair of the WSMO working group. This year he will Chair the European Semantic Web Conference and the Artificial Intelligence Methods, Systems and Applications, and will be the Director of the Fourth Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web. 

David Martin is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, where he has been on the research staff since 1994.  He has worked extensively in the fields of Knowledge-Based Software Engineering and Agent-Based Systems, and was one of the principal designers of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA). He was a Principal Investigator for SRI's DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language) project, and serves as chair of the research coalition that developed OWL-S, a service description language for the Semantic Web. He was also co-chair of the language subcommittee of The Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI), and co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's 2005 Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services. 
 
David has recently served on committees of the following relevant conferences: ISWC (Senior Program Committee, Tutorials co-chair), ESWC (Program Committee), ICEC (Int'l Program Committee), AIMSA (Program Committee), SemPGRID (Program Committee), DBASE (Program Committee), AAAI (Program Committee).  He has served as an organizer of a number of Semantic Web Services workshops, including previous occurrences of semantics4ws, and workshops at ISWC, WWW, and AAMAS. 

Martin Hepp is a professor of General Management and E-business at the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich, Germany and a professor of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria, where he leads the research group “Semantics in Business Information Systems”. He created eClassOWL, the first industry-strength ontology for products and services and is currently working on using Semantic Web services technology for Business Process Management. Before joining the University of Innsbruck, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers (FL) and a Visiting Scientist with the e-Business Solutions Group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. Martin holds a Master’s degree in Business Management and Business Information Systems and a Ph.D. in Business Information Systems from the University of Würzburg (Germany).  Also, he is involved in leading EU research projects that transfer Semantic Web results into core business domains, e.g. SUPER (addressing the use of semantics for Business Process Management) and MUSING, which employs ontologies for next-generation Business Intelligence. He was the organizer of numerous workshops and conference tracks on conceptual modeling, Semantic Web topics, and information systems and member of more than thirty conference and workshop program committees, including ACM SAC'06, ESWC (2006-2008), and BIS (2006-2008). Martin is a Senior PC member of the European Semantic Web Conference 2008 (ESWC 2008). 

Dumitru Roman works as a researcher at Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck in the area of semantically-enabled service-oriented architectures. Since joining STI Innsbruck (formally called DERI Innsbruck) he has been involved in several FP5, FP6, and FP7 EU funded projects, e.g. SWWS, DIP, ASG, SWING, SUPER, etc., in the area of semantic Web and Web services. He is the main author of the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) and co-authored many WSMO related publications, including the Springer book "Enabling Semantic Web Services". Before joining STI Innsbruck, he received a Diploma Engineer in Computer Science from the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His previous research includes composition of semantically enabled services in the context of open agent architectures, planning techniques, reconfigurable hardware-software co-design, and networking (he is also CCNA). Dumitru Roman initiated and chaired various conferences and workshops in the area of service-orientation, e.g. ICIW, MoSO, SerComp, mda4soa, semantics4ws, etc., and currently serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Web Services Practices (IJWSP) and Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Mobile Services and Ontologies (International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems). He was invited speaker and gave tutorials at various events on several topics including Semantic Web, knowledge representation, Web Services and service-orientation. 

Amit Sheth is an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, an IEEE Fellow and the director of the Kno.e.sis Center in the Computer Science and Engineering department of the Wright State University.  Earlier he was at the University of Georgia where he started the LSDIS lab in 1994 and he served in R&D groups at Bellcore, Unisys, and Honeywell. His research has led to two commercial companies which he founded and led, several Enterprise and Web based products and many deployed applications in industry, health care and in scientific research.  His is one of the best cited authors in Computer Science (22 publications with 100+ citations each, h-index of 50), has given 200 invited talks and colloquia including 30 keynotes, (co)-organized/chaired 40 conferences/workshops, and served on over 125 program committees. He is on several journal editorial boards, is the EIC of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), joint EIC of DAPD, and editor of two Springer book series.

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