Second Workshop: Workshop

WORKSHOP IN COMO, PALAZZO NATTA, May 26-28

The workshop will take place at Palazzo Natta, an historical building in the city center (link, map); the main social event of the workshop will take place on Thursday afternoon; the current program includes: boat trip on the Como Lake to Bellagio (link), visit the spring gardens of Villa Melzi (link), stroll through the narrow streets of Bellagio, and dinner at Ristorante da Silvio (link).

May 26, 9:15-10:00
Stefano Ceri: An Overview of the Early Results of the Search Computing Project (ppt file)  (audio)
(with Alessandro Bozzon's LiquidQuery Demo - video audio )

May 26, 10:00–12:30
Session on “Semantic Resource Framework”
Organizers: Marco Brambilla, Alex Campi, Davide Eynard
Experts: Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Francesco Guerra, and Domenico Beneventano (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), Fabian Suchanek (Microsoft Research)

This session is focused on linking SeCo to the Momis and Yago projects. It aims at exploring how mediator-based techniques and ontological knowledge can help the service registration process in SeCo by associating semantics with service definitions (and service connections) at the conceptual, logical, and physical levels. Momis (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is a framework to perform information extraction and integration from both structured and semistructured data sources. Information integration is performed in a semi-automatic way by exploiting the knowledge in a Common Thesaurus and descriptions of source schemas with a combination of clustering techniques and Description Logics. Yago is a light-weight and extensible ontology with high coverage and quality, that currently contains more than 1 million entities and 5 million facts automatically extracted from Wikipedia and unified with WordNet, using a carefully designed combination of rule-based and heuristic methods.

May 26 14:00-16:00
Session on “Wrapping Technology and Ontological Annotation”
Organizers: Marco Brambilla, Alessandro Campi
Experts: Georg Gottlob(Oxford University), Sergio Flesca (Università della Calabria), and “Diadem Team”

This session is focused on linking SeCo to the Diadem projects. Diadem (Domain-centric Intelligent Automated Data Extraction Methodology) sets out to solve the problem of extracting complex, structured information from large numbers of websites. Diadem, aims to create software that can crawl through every website in a particular field – the property market, for example, or restaurants, or air travel – and pull out the information they contain in structured form. Equipped with a basic knowledge of the general principles its domain works on, it will be able to analyze each web page’s low-level structure as it goes in order to extract the information it contains.

May 26, 16:30–18:30
Session on “Design Tools and Mashup Languages”
Organizers: Piero Fraternali, Marco Brambilla, Alex Bozzon
Experts: Fabio Casati (Università di Trento), Florian Daniel (Università di Trento)

This session is focused on linking SeCo to the mashArt project. A mashup-like interface is used in SeCo on top of the semantic service registration for configuring search queries. mashArt is a mashup platform supporting “universal integration”, i.e., integration at the data, application, and user interface layer inside one and the same mashup environment.

May 27, 9:00-10:00
Session on “Search Computing for Research Evaluation”
Organizers: Stefano Ceri, Alessandro Bozzon
Experts: Fabio Casati (Università di Trento), Imran Muhammad (Università di Trento)

This session is focused on linking SeCo to the ResEval project. ResEval (open and RESource-oriented research impact EVALuation tool) aims at building an open and resource-oriented tool for evaluating research impact of individual researchers and groups. The advantages of the tool are that it relies on several sources for computing metrics, freely available on the Internet, and provides an easy way for defining and computing custom metrics for individuals and research groups. The session is focused on understanding the connection between ResEval and SeCo, thus supporting multi-domain, multi-ranking queries on ResEval services.

May 27, 10:30-13:00
Session on “Query Processing”
Organizers: Daniele Braga, Michael Grossniklaus
Experts: Dana Florescu (Oracle), Donald Kossmann (ETH Zürich), Norman Paton (Manchester University)

The aim of this session is to establish the challenges and opportunities related to query processing for Search Computing. In particular, the workshop will focus on the consolidation and evolution of the current query processor. To do so, we will gather expert experiences and opinions based on a set of targeted questions. Each expert will be given the opportunity to present their viewpoint, followed by an open discussion which (hopefully) leads to a consistent summary, synthesis and directions for future work.

May 27, 14:00–16:30
Session on “Rank Join”
Organizers: Davide Martinenghi, Marco Tagliasacchi
Experts: Ihab F. Ilyas (University of Waterloo), Neoklis Polyzotis (University of California)

This session aims at providing the audience with an overview of the different uses of ranking in SeCo-related contexts. Invited experts will give presentations focusing on relevant instances of the rank-join problem, along with short demos of state-of-art systems. Then, an open discussion on how-to's, do's and don'ts of rank-join in SeCo will be started, trying to identify the most relevant future directions of research in the field.

May 28, 10:00-13:00
Session on “Search Computing for BioMedical Applications”
Organizer: Marco Masseroli
Experts: Franck Valentin (European Bioinformatics Institute), Norman Paton (Manchester University), Paolo Missier (Manchester University), Alfonso Valencia (Spanish National Cancer Research Center), Luciano Milanesi (Italian National Research Council), Paolo Romano (Italian National Institute for Cancer Research), Angela Bachi (San Raffaele Hospital)

This session has two purposes: exploring the use of Taverna and EBI search services in connection with Bio-SeCo, and understanding the needs of bio-genetic researchers concerning complex search and bio-molecular knowledge discovery. Taverna is an open source family of tools for designing and executing workflows, allowing for the automation of experimental methods through the use of a number of different services (such as Web services) from a very diverse set of domains – from biology, chemistry and medicine to music, meteorology and social sciences. EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) is a non-profit academic organization for research and services in bioinformatics. The Institute manages databases of biological data including nucleic acid, protein sequences and macromolecular structures, which can be accessed though EB-eye, a fast and efficient search engine.

May 28, 14:30 – 17:00
Session on “User-centered Approach to Search Computing Applications”
Organizers: Marta Carubolo, Emanuele Della Valle
Experts: Roberto Verganti, Tommaso Buganza, Marta Corubolo

The aim of this session is to find ideas for new “SeCo like” applications. Adopting a user-centered approach, the experts will lead the participants to generate new ideas for potential killer applications.