Announcement: Workshop on E-Services and the Semantic Web (ESSW2002)

     ---------------------- Announcing the -----------------------
     |                                                           |
     |   Workshop on E-Services and the Semantic Web (ESSW2002)  | 
     |                                                           |
     |              May 31/June 1, 2002, in Toronto              |
     |                                                           |
     |                 in conjunction with CAiSE                 |
     |                                                           |
     |              http://db.bell-labs.com/essw2002             |
     -------------------------------------------------------------



OBJECTIVES AND THEME OF THE WORKSHOP
==================================== 

The "E-Services and the Semantic Web" workshop will address issues
related to the confluence of e-services (self-contained Web accessible
programs and devices) and the semantic web (annotating web artifacts
to enable automated reasoning about them).  The
database/workflow/systems communities and the semantic-web/AI
communities are tending to work separately when it comes to developing
technology for providing more automation for e-services activities
such as discovery, composition, and monitoring.  This workshop is
intended to substantially increase cross-fertilization between the two
communities by running a high-quality workshop on this confluence.  In
particular, the workshop will bring together researchers from the
several communities that work on various aspects of e-services and the
semantic web.

Industry has provided the initial building blocks for programmatic
access to e-services, through standards such as UDDI, WSDL, ebXML, and
SOAP, and through distributed computing e-service platforms such as
.NET, WebSphere, and E-Speak.  Nevertheless, many systems issues
remain largely unresolved, such as process models for e-services
composition, code sharing and reuse, distributed process and data
management, transaction paradigms, security, recovery, and mobility.
The vision of the Semantic Web is to annotate World Wide Web artifacts
with machine-interpretable descriptions of their underlying semantics,
and provide mechanisms for automated reasoning about them.  The
application of Semantic Web technologies to e-services requires the
specification of service interfaces, content, and capabilities.  The
resolution of systems issues around e-services, along with the
provision of machine-interpretable e-service descriptions, will enable
automation of a variety of tasks including e-service discovery,
invocation, assembly, interoperation, and monitoring.  Such technology
will have broad application in domains such as e-commerce, health
care, science, education, and government.

The ESSW2002 workshop will provide a forum for presentation and
discussion of theoretical foundations, computational techniques, and
emerging systems technologies for combining e-services, including
description, discovery, composition, interoperation and automation.
This will include investigation of e-services issues in:
- workflow and distributed systems (e.g., process models, 
       transactional properties, security, optimization), 
- AI (e.g., knowledge representation and reasoning, ontologies, 
       planning, and verification), 
- databases (e.g., metadata, data management), 
- the application of the Semantic Web paradigm.  
The workshop will also address principled applications of these
technologies in areas such as e-commerce, e-business, health care,
scientific computing, education, and e-government.

E-service development draws on research and technology from several
research communities, including DB, Workflow, AI, conceptual modeling,
process modeling, distributed systems, and systems engineering, to
name a few.  A key objective of this workshop is to provide a forum
that fosters collaboration and synergies between e-services
researchers from these often disparate communities.  In addition,
the workshop hopes to build on the foundations provided by the
previous "Technologies for E-services (TES)" workshops (held with
VLDB) and "International Workshop on the Semantic Web (SemWeb)"
workshops (first one with ECDL and the second with WWW10).  The
ESSW2002 workshop will expose systems-oriented e-services researchers
to the approaches and technologies being developed by the Semantic Web
e-services community, and will likewise expose Semantic Web e-services
researchers to the full breadth of systems issues raised by
e-services.


KEY-NOTE SPEAKERS
=================

Ian Horrocks (University of Manchester, England)
Gerhard Weikum (University of the Saarland, Germany)


WORKSHOP FORMAT
===============
This workshop will include presentations of research achievements
related to the workshop topics, invited talks, and forums for more
free forms of discussion, such as panels and a workshop dinner.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
===================
Topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

-- Formal Models and Languages for Service Description
-- Process Models for Composite Services
-- Service Descriptions and Ontologies
-- Service Registration, Discovery, and Selection
-- Service Assembly, Interoperation, and Re-use
-- Execution and Monitoring of Composite Services
-- Reasoning about Services and Composite Services
-- Verification, Proof and Trust
-- Agents
-- Personalization and Preference Languages
-- Security
-- Cross-enterprise service interoperation
-- Transactional Aspects
-- Performance Aspects
-- Distributed and Ambient Computing 
-- Database Services for the Semantic Web
-- Business and Payment Models
-- Standards
-- Applications in Business, Education, Healthcare, Science, Government


IMPORTANT DATES
===============

March 15, 2002:   Paper submission

April 19, 2002:  Notification of acceptance

May 17, 2002:    Final contributions

May 31/June 1, 2002:  Workshop


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Papers should be at most 5000 words in length

Electronic submissions are mandatory, in PDF or postscript.  They
should be emailed to essw2002@research.bell-labs.com by March 15,
2002.


FORM OF PUBLICATION
===================

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together active
researchers, hear about new research, and create a forum for
thoughtful and provocative discussion.  With this in mind, the
workshop will accept original papers, and also papers that may be
appearing in conferences with formal, archival proceedings.

An electronic proceedings of the conference papers will be posted
on the web.  Paper copies will also be distributed at the workshop.

The workshop organizers are currently working to find a journal
what would be willing to publish more complete versions of selected
papers from the workshop.


PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS
===================

Rick Hull, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Sheila McIlraith, Knowledge Systems Lab, Stanford University


PROGRAM COMMITTEE (PARTIAL LISTING)   
====================================

Serge Abiteboul (INRIA, France)
  serge.abiteboul@inria.fr
  http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~abitebou/

Gustavo Alonso (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
  alonso@inf.ethz.ch
  http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/alonso/

Fabio Casati (Hewlett Packard Labs, USA)
  fabio_casati@hp.com
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Fabio_Casati/

Vassilis Christophides (ICS-FORTH, Greece)
  christop@ics.forth.gr
  http://www.ics.forth.gr/~christop/

Dieter Fensel (Vrije Uniersity Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  dieter@cs.vu.nl
  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter/

Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Uniersity Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  frank.van.harmelen@cs.vu.nl
  http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/

Rick Hull (Bell Labs, USA)
  hull@lucent.com
  http://db.bell-labs.com/user/hull/

Mauricio Lenzerini (Univerista di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy)
  lenzerini@dis.uniroma1.it
  http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lenzerin/

Dave Martin (SRI, USA)
  martin@ai.sri.com 
  http://www.ai.sri.com/~martin/ 

Drew McDermott (Yale, USA)
  drew.mcdermott@yale.edu
  http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/

Sheila McIlraith (Stanford, USA)
  sam@ksl.stanford.edu
  http://www.ksl.Stanford.EDU/people/sam/

Rakesh Mohan (IBM, USA)
  rakesh@watson.ibm.com

Dimitris Plexousakis (University of Crete, Greece)
  dp@csd.uch.gr
  http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/Members/dp.html

Krithi Ramamritham (IIT Bombay, India)
  krithi@cse.iitb.ernet.in
  http://www.cse.iitb.ernet.in/people/upage_krithi.php

Arnaud Sahuguet (Bell Labs)
  sahuguet@lucent.com
  http://db.bell-labs.com/user/sahuguet/

Katia Sycara (Carnegie-Mellon Univ., USA)
  katia@cs.cmu.edu
  http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sycara/





Send questions and comments to
======================
essw2002@research.bell-labs.com

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2002 11:35:31 UTC