Vienna Meeting: W3C and Semantic Web

Vienna June 20th, 2005

• Information
• Program and Slides
• Speakers and Abstracts
• Photos, more pictures from Máté Pataki (Hungarian W3C office)
• Heise Newsticker
  
• Participants
• Venue
• About W3C W3C.DE/AT
• Presscontact
• Local Contact

Information

The W3C Office in Germany and Austria in cooperation with the Austrian Association for Research in IT (AARIT) and the Austrian Computer Society organize an event to provide state of the art information on W3C and the Semantic Web. The event will take place in Vienna on June 20th, 2005.

Program and Slides

Speakers and Abstracts

Klaus Birkenbihl, The Work of W3C

Abstract: W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines. In its first ten years, W3C published more than eighty such W3C Recommendations. The topics covered by this work range from basic architecture (mainly based on the W3C Recommendations for XML) over web publishing (e.g. XHTML, XFORMS, CSS) to Mobile Web, Device Independance, Web Security, Web Services and Semantic Web. Not to forget Web Accessability in order to have the web anywhere, anytime, for anyone and on any device.

Author's Bio: Klaus Birkenbihl hold a diploma as a mathematician of the university of Bonn. He joined GMD in 1970 and did research in Software Technology. Later he became head of GMD's computer center in Bonn. He gave lectures in computerscience at the university of cologne and at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. In the late 80's he became head of the department for network engineering.

Among other activities he was founding member of the European Academic Research Network ( EARN), Member of the operational committee of the German Research Network (DFN), Deputy Director of EARN Germany, member of the EASInet steering committee and Chairman of the German Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.DE). Since 1998 he is the treasurer and office Manager of the German Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.DE) and manager of the World Wide Web Consortium Office in Germany and Austria.

Ivan Herman: Questions (and Answers) on the Semantic Web

Abstract: The technical public, when hearing about the concepts of the Semantic Web, has a number of questions. These questions might come as the consequence of misunderstandings, of inadequate explanations, or of a lack of necessary information. This presentation tries to collect some of these 'general' questions and attempts to answer them. Topics that are touched upon are:

• is the Semantic Web 'Artificial Intelligence on the Web',
  
• is this only a fancy research subject,
•  are there tools around,
  
• isn't it too complex,
  
• what are the still open issues, etc.

Author's Bio: Ivan Herman graduated as a mathematician at the University of Budapest, in Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Universite Paris VI he joined a Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist...). He then spent three years at a software house in Münich, Germany, before joining the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences in Amsterdam (CWI) in 1989, where he holds a tenure position. He received a PhD degree in computer science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Although he worked in quite different areas ( distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming) he spend most of these years in computer graphics and visualization. He also participated in various related ISO standardization activities. He has over 50 scientific publications, served on various conferences as program or tutorial chair, IPC member, etc. A more complete list of his publications and the projects he participated in is listed at his home page at CWI: http://www.cwi.nl/~ivan.

Ivan has been active in the Eurographics Association since 1985, served as chair of the workshop and publication boards. He is now vice-chair of the Association. His activities in EG also provided him with his first active encounter with the Web: he created and maintained the Web site of the Association back in 1994 (or thereabouts) and he was the head of the online activities until the end of 2000. He was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, in May 2000. He was also the Advisory Committee Representative for CWI at W3C, and head of the W3C Dutch Office. He joined the permanent team of the World Wide Web Consortium in January 2001, and is currently responsible for the W3C Offices Worldwide and a official member of the Semantic Web Coordination Group at W3C.

J. Pokorny, P. Vojtas: Extensions of Semantic web modeling towards ordering of query results

Abstract: Selection of a resource can depend on several attributes of user requirements which are inherently vague or scaled (scored). We discuss extensions of Semantic web modeling with techniques of constructing a global score depending on particular query attribute score. This enables us to provide users with best (top-k, ordered set of) answers.

Georg Gottlob: From HTML to XML and RDF: How to Get Web Data Into Your Applications

Abstract: HTML, XML, and RDF are W3C standards. Web pages are mainly formatted in HTML while corporate data processing applications need structured data in formats such as XML or even RDF. There is thus a huge gap between unstructured Web data and the data formats needed by various applications. In this talk I present Lixto, a method and tool bridging this gap. After an interactive training phase, the Lixto software can automatically navigate to (known) web pages, recognize relevant data on this page, extract and annotate this data, transform it into meaningful XML or even RDF,  and deliver it to local applications in highly structured form. This way it is possible to automatically and continually populate and update a data warehouse or an ontology with data stemming from disparate Web pages, or to monitor Web pages for relevant changes.

The Lixto project started at TU Wien (www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at) and was continued by  Lixto Software (www.lixto.com), a spin off company of TU Wien and EC3, the Vienna Electronic Commerce Competence Center (www.ec3.at). In this talk I will give an overview of the Lixto project and a short demo of the software. Lixto is currently used by several major companies. I will report about some interesting use cases and business applications, mainly in the business intelligence area. Joint work with Robert Baumgartner,  Sergio Flesca, Marcus Herzog, and others.

Author's Bio: Georg Gottlob is a Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests are database theory (in particular, query languages), Web information processing, constraint satisfaction problems, nonmonotonic reasoning, finite model theory,  and computational complexity. On the more applied side, he supervises a number of industry projects dealing with Web information extraction and related topics. From 1989 to 1996 he directed the industry-funded Christian Doppler Laboratory for Expert Systems. He is a co-founder of the Lixto Corporation.

Gottlob got his Engineer and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from TU Vienna, Austria in 1979 and 1981, respectively. He  holds his current position since 1988. Before that, he was affiliated with the Italian National Research Council in Genoa, Italy, and with the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He was a research scholar at Stanford University, in 1999 an invited McKay Professor at UC Berkeley, and in 2002 a Visiting Professor of Univ. Paris VII.

Georg Gottlob was an invited speaker at many international conferences. He  received the Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian National Science Fund and is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He recently chaired the Program Committees of ACM PODS 2000 and of IJCAI 2003.

Péter Vojnisek: The Business side of Semantic Web

Abstract: This talk will describe the pros and contras to start using SW related technologies in a business environment. What kind of difficulties will development companies face during their SW developments? Which kind of tools could be used? What are the impacts on the life of corporates?

Author's Bio: He is the Chief Technology Officer of Progos Ltd since 2002, working on web applications since 1999. He finished his studies at Budapest University of Technology at faculty of transportation engineering, his special field was aeronautical science and IT system management. He have researched on GPS systems and GIS used in the aeronautical industry. He won internships to S+C Unternehmensberatung AG, Winterthur Switzerland, JM University, Liverpool UK, University of Paris, France, Malev (Hungarian Airlines) Budapest, Hungary. After getting his MSC he joined to the team of Progos where his main task is to coordinate development and research work. He is working on Semantic Web related technologies since 2002.

Thomas Baker: Report from the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices Working Group

Abstract:  The aim of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group is to support developers of Semantic Web applications by providing "best-practice" materials ranging from engineering guidelines to educational documents.  This talk will describe recent deliverables from the working group with a particular focus on the maintenance of vocabularies and ontologies.

Author's Bio: Dr. Thomas H. Baker recently moved from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to Goettingen State and University Library. He was a researcher in the Library of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Bonn before and was a founding member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. He currently serves on the DCMI Directorate and as head of the DCMI Usage Board. He has over the past few years participated in several European projects related to metadata, and currently coordinates a task force on vocabulary management in the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group.

Participants (was Registration Information and Participation Fee)

(Registration is now open.

Fee is 90€ non members, 70€ members (OCG, AARIT, W3C or ERCIM), 40€ students.)

Venue

The event will be at

EITHER:by CAT - City Airport Train

• 16 mins to "Wien Mitte"
• Fare: 8/15 Euro (single/return)
• leaves every 30 minutes, at xx.05h and xx.35h

OR: by "Schnellbahn" S7

• 26 mins to "Wien Mitte"
• Fare: 3/6 Euro (single/return)
• leaves every 30 minutes

THEN (from "Wien Mitte")

• use Metro/Underground line U4
• heading to "Hütteldorf"
• get off at "Karlsplatz" (2-3 min)
• at Karlsplatz metro station, use exit "Resselpark"
• you're just a few minutes walk away from Mozartgasse

OPTIONAL (from "Karlsplatz")

• take the TRAM line 62 or 65
• use exit "Oper" instead of "Resselpark"
• board either line (you can't go the wrong direction, "Oper" is the last stop of both lines)
• exit at "Paulanagasse" (2 stops), Mozartgasse is right across from the tram stop.

About W3C and W3C.DE/AT

About AARIT

AARIT, the Austrian Association for Research in IT (Österreichische Vereinigung für IT-Forschung), was founded in May 2001 as a platform for the Austrian information technology research community. AARIT is a legal entity and an independent nonprofit association. AARIT is ERCIM's gateway to the Austrian information technology research community.

The mission of AARIT is to pomote research and development in information technology and related subject areas. To achieve this, AARIT aims to strengthen scientific co-operation among its members on a national level, through international co-operation and through transfer of know-how and knowledge. The activities of AARIT include co-operation with and participation in scientific organisations nationally and internationally. The Association carries out, participates in or commissions research projects, organises meetings and courses, and participates in conferences. Further activities include the granting of fellowships, awards and sponsorships and the collection and exchange of information among members and third parties.

About OCG

The objective of OCG comprehensive and interdisciplinary promotion of information processing, with due regard to its effects on man and society. In fulfilling this objective, the Society performs five primary functions:

• It serves as an umbrella organization of associations, organizations, and institutions in Austria involved in information processing (32 institutional members at this time).
• It represents Austria in the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and in similar regional associations (e.g. CEPIS - the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies - and IMIA - the International Medical Informatics Association).
• It is affiliate member of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) and of the IEEE Computer Society.
• It provides members with services, information and consultation.
• It promotes research and development projects, especially those of an interdisciplinary nature.
• It has established several Working Groups dealing with specialized aspects in the field of information technology.
• It organizes international conferences and congresses and helps its member institutions to organize such events.

At this time the Austrian Computer Society has more than 1000 individual members and more than 100 supporting and institutional members and it provides with our monthly mailings including information about national and international events such as conferences and congresses and our own journal "OCG Journal", which is published at least four times a year (in German language).

Presscontact

Klaus Birkenbihl, Deutsch-Österreichisches W3C Büro, Klaus.Birkenbihl@w3c.de, Tel.: +49 2241 14 1972

Local Contact

Klaus Birkenbihl, W3C.DE/AT
Last revised: $Date: 2007/11/08 10:23:33 $

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