Semantic Web and Database Conferences

SWDB’06, April 8th 2006

I. Budak ArpinarLSDIS Lab, Department of Computer Science,

University of Georgiahttp://lsdis.cs.uga.edu

Semantic Web

• The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.– Usually through use of ontologies in RDF(S) or OWL

• Ultimate goal - effective and efficient global knowledge exchange.– Allows to find, share, and combine information more

easily

The Semantic Web triangle

AI(Knowledge Representation,

Ontologies)

Software & Knowledge Engineering(Software Components, Agents, Process Modeling)

DB(Semi-structured data, Interoperability)

Ontology Languages & Semi-structured DataOntology Transformation

Reasoning, Planning,DAML-S

Libraries of Components,

Interoperation for Web Services

Report from the Semantic Web Working Symposium 30. July - 1. August,I. Cruz, S. Decker,J. Euzenat, D. McGuinness

Challenge – A personal view

• The level of interaction between Database and Semantic Web communities is not at the desired level.

• Semantic Web community tries to exploit Database techniques: query languages, indexing, storage etc.

• Database community’s use of Semantic Web techniques is limited.– Consequently, major Database conferences

(SIGMOD/VLDB/ICDE) include a few papers on the Semantic Web.

Some Examples (2006)• ICDE’06:

– Industrial Session: RDF, Ontologies, Metadata • RDF Object Type and Reification in the Database• RDF-based Relational Database Integration and its

Application in Traditional Chinese Medicine• Supporting Keyword Columns with Ontology-based

Referential Constraints in DBMS• Experiment Management with Metadata-based Integration

for Collaborative Scientific Research– 2 workshops: SENS’06, SWDB’06

• PODS’06:– A recent interest on the Semantic Web:

• Tutorial: Enrico Franconi on the Semantic Web

Some Examples (2005)• ICDE’05:

– Papers:• SemCast: Semantic Multicast for Content-Based Data

Dissemination • Bootstrapping Semantic Annotations for Content-Rich HTML

Documents • SIGMOD’05:

– Papers:• Reference Reconciliation in Complex Information Spaces • Semantics and Evaluation Techniques for Window

Aggregates in Data Streams

– Industrial Session: • Metadata Management for Data Integration

– Panel: • Databases and Information Retrieval: Rethinking the Great

Divide

Some Examples (2005)

• VLDB’05:– Papers:

• Automatic Composition of Transition-based Semantic Web Services with Messaging

• An Efficient SQL-based RDF Querying Scheme• Semantic Adaptation of Schema Mappings when

Schemas Evolve

Semantics and DB Community• Semantics has not been new to the Database community.

– Semantics in data models was studied intensively in the 1980s, and applied to problems such as query processing, view management, schema transformation, schema integration and transaction processing. 

• Semantic heterogeneity and interoperability have been studied as part of all major information systems architectures during the last three decades, including federated, mediator, and information brokering architectures. 

• Many projects in information interoperability and integration have addressed semantic heterogeneity.

Stefan Decker’s Blog

• The database community is very heavily invested in the XML stack.

• Query processing and data management questions relating to the RDF stack are so far ignored by the Database community.

• Data management solutions including query languages for RDF are mostly developed inside the Semantic Web community without much involvement from Database people.

Database Research Report

• Final Report, The Lowell Database Research Self-Assessment Meeting, May 2003 (in Section 3.11: New User Interfaces):– "Perhaps most interesting is the research opportunities

suggested by the term “Semantic Web.”  While it may be unclear what the concept truly entails, much of the recent work has centered on “ontologies.” … The database community should be looking for opportunities to exploit these developments in future database management systems."

Questions

• How to promote a better dialogue among Semantic Web and Database communities with a common goal of building better and more efficient Web information systems?

• How to improve presence of Semantic Web (papers) in major Database conferences?

Panelists

• Vipul Kashyap (Partners HealthCare)• Shamkant Navathe (GA Tech) • Susie Stephens (Oracle) • Paolo Atzeni (Universita Roma Tre) • Amit Sheth (LSDIS, UGA)

Senior DB Researchers• "From Databases to Dataspaces

: A New Abstraction for Information Management" by Michael Franklin, Alon Halevy and David Maier (Sigmod Record, Dec. 2005) – "Recent developments in the field of knowledge

representation (and the Semantic Web) offer two main benefits as we try to make sense of heterogeneous collections of data in a dataspace: simple but useful formalisms for representing ontologies, and the concept of URI (uniform resource identifiers) as a mechanism for referring to global constants on which there exists some agreement among multiple data providers."

Other Issues• Perception of SW by DB-community as too logics-based or 'agenty'

– is OWL really a "logics ontology language"? • XML serialization of RDF does not build upon (or exploit) XML

technologies, such as XQuery, XPath, XSLT, DTD, XML-Schema – – SW has missed on most advances in XML

• SW involves various areas, but full adoption is still years away - Examples: IR, DB, KR, AI, Web research

• The future? – A rebirth of SW in the form of 'semantics science' that would be

applicable in various areas (ie. DB) - semantics as complementary/supporting technology - implementation neutral, is it worth pushing for SW query languages such as SPARQL vs. extensions on SQL, such as Oracle's RDF datatypes

• Adoption is expected first from specialized domains - bioinformatics, farmaceutical research - DB+SW opportunities on high volume, rich data