Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Principles of Query Visualization

Query Visualization (QV) is the problem of transforming a given query into a graphical representation that helps humans understand its meaning. This task is notably different from designing a Visual Query Language (VQL) that helps a user compose a query. This article discusses the principles of relational query visualization and its potential for simplifying user interactions with relational data.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, preprint for IEEE Data Engineering Bulleti

Ontological support for the evolution of future services oriented architectures

Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a useful framework for developing interoperable, large-scale systems, typically implemented using the Web Services (WS) standards. However, the maintenance and evolution of SOA systems present many challenges. SmartLife applications are intelligent user-centered systems and a special class of SOA systems that present even greater challenges for a software maintainer. Ontologies and ontological modeling can be used to support the evolution of SOA systems. This paper describes the development of a SOA evolution ontology and its use to develop an ontological model of a SOA system. The ontology is based on a standard SOA ontology. The ontological model can be used to provide semantic and visual support for software maintainers during routine maintenance tasks. We discuss a case study to illustrate this approach, as well as the strengths and limitations

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Data-driven optimization of search service composition for answering multi-domain queries

Answering multi-domain queries requires the combination of knowledge from various domains. Such queries are inadequately answered by general-purpose search engines, because domain- specific systems typically exhibit sophisticated knowledge about their own fields of expertise. Moreover, multi-domain queries typically require combining in the result domain knowledge possibly coming from multiple web resources, therefore conventional crawling and indexing techniques, based on individual pages, are not adequate. In this paper we present a conceptual framework for addressing the composition of search services for solving multi-domain queries. The approach consists in building an infrastructure for search service composition that leaves within each search system the responsibility of maintaining and improving its domain knowledge, and whose main challenge is to provide the “glue” between them; such glue is expressed in the format of joins upon search service results, and for this feature we regard our approach as “data-driven”. We present an overall architecture, and the work that has been done so far in the development of some of the main modules.publishe

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology