C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S

Workshop on
Middleware for the Semantic Web: Enabling a Web of Knowledge and Services

http://events.sti-innsbruck.at/msw-icsc2008/

At the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
http://icsc.eecs.uci.edu/

August 4-7, 2008, Santa Clara, CA, USA

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

WORKSHOP INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES
====================================
The vision of the Semantic Web has always been a global Web of knowledge
parallel to the existing Web of data. This vision has been returned to numerous
times, including the call for ISWC 2005 to "put the Web back in the Semantic
Web", or Tim Berners-Lee's recent post on the Giant Global Graph.

While standards and technology progress towards maturity, and Semantic
Computing is reaching readiness for isolated application (e.g., behind company
firewalls), the challenges of the originally envisioned global Semantic Web
have received less attention. We expect millions, even billions, of knowledge
and service providers and consumers to interact, integrate and coordinate
(Figure 1). Technological solutions paying tribute to the issues of
scalability, heterogeneity, dynamism, distributedness and openness that come
along in such an environment are thus a necessity.

With this workshop we aim at bringing together promising cutting-edge
middleware and Semantic Computing research, which - in integration and
coordination rather than in current isolation - address the aforementioned
challenges and can form a new semantic middleware layer that enables the global
Web of knowledge and services, and hence the true Semantic Web vision. We
address the traditional issues of data and process heterogeneity, however with
a clear focus on large-scale, open and distributed environments, i.e. in
settings that match the Semantic Web in the true Web sense, rather than on a
corporate or even application level.

In consequence the workshop focuses on three cutting edge Semantic Computing
research areas whose integration is expected to enable the new semantic
middleware:
  * access and discovery to distributed knowledge
  * semantic service oriented architectures
  * integration and coordination of knowledge and service providers and consumers

The workshop will collect the best results from these fields, while clearly
favoring proposals that might deliver solutions to all three of them. We
clearly focus on approaches that exploit the synergies between the three fields
in order to develop novel and promising technologies towards a global Web of
knowledge and services.


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:

* Languages, programming and implementation techniques for middleware technology
* Extensions of 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
* Methods to deal with the complexity of managing distributed knowledge and
   processes
* Methods to deal with coordination of distributed services and applications
   working with semantic data
* Metadata infrastructures for the modeling and management of semantic middleware
* Self-organization in semantic middleware systems
* Reasoning about middleware structures, tasks and behavior
* Meta-level architectures and reflective middleware: inspection and adaptation
* Mobility-aware semantic middleware
* Practical experiences in using semantic middleware to realize service-oriented
   architectures, knowledge engineering systems, i.e. the Web of knowledge
* Deployment perspectives for future semantic middleware
* Studies on existing and emerging target markets for semantically enabled
   middleware


IMPORTANT DATES
===============
Submission Deadline: April 4, 2008
Notification: May 5, 2008
Camera-Ready & Registration: May 16, 2008


SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
==========================
Authors should submit a 6-page paper in double-column IEEE format following the
submission guidelines available on the ICSC2008 Web page. All workshop papers
will be included in the IEEE conference proceedings.

Please submit your contributions via EDAS: http://edas.info


ORGANIZERS
==========
Elena Simperl, Semantic Technology Institute - University of Innsbruck, Austria
Reto Krummenacher, Semantic Technology Institute - University of Innsbruck, Austria
Lyndon JB Nixon, Dept. Computer Science - Free University Berlin, Germany
Robert Tolksdorf, Dept. Computer Science - Free University Berlin, Germany

CONTACT
=======
Reto Krummenacher
University of Innsbruck (Semantic Technology Institute)
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
E reto.krummenacher@sti2.at
T +43 512 507 6452
F +43 512 507 9872