Semantic Web and
Database Conferences
SWDB’06, April 8th 2006
I. Budak Arpinar
LSDIS Lab, Department of Computer Science,
University of Georgia
http://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
Software & Knowledge Engineering
(Software Components, Agents, Process Modeling)
Report from the
Semantic Web
Working Symposium
30. July - 1. August,
I. Cruz, S. Decker,
J. Euzenat, D.
McGuinness
Libraries of Components,
Reasoning, Planning,
DAML-S
Interoperation for Web Services
AI
DB
(Knowledge Representation,
(Semi-structured data, Interoperability)
Ontologies)
Ontology Languages & Semi-structured Data
Ontology Transformation
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 SelfAssessment 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