Semantic Web and Database Conferences SWDB’06, April 8th 2006 I. Budak Arpinar LSDIS Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia

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 Data Ontology 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)From Databases to Dataspaces: A New Abstraction for Information Management Michael FranklinAlon HalevyDavid Maier –"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