ConTEL 2011

Keynote lecture 3

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Semantic Reality or how to link the real world

Semantic Reality or how to link the real world

Manfred Hauswirth (http://www.manfredhauswirth.org/) is Vice-Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland and professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG).

Abstract:

Until now the virtual world of information sources on the World Wide Web and activities in the real world have always been separated. However, knowledge accessible on the Web (the virtual world) may influence activities in the real world and vice versa, but these influences are usually indirect and not immediate. We still lack means to interconnect and link this information in a meaningful, general-purpose, and simple way. To turn smart objects into truly Internet-connected Objects (ICO), IP-based access to them is required as a unifying network layer. As the smart objects landscape is very heterogeneous in terms of hardware capabilities/constraints and network protocols, the necessary efforts to achieve this are significant and come from a variety of areas, e.g., CORE, 6LoWPAN, ROLL, to name a few. However, to make objects readily useful for application development, we cannot stop at the network layer but also have to address some of the integration issues at the higher layers. For instance, even though access to ICOs is enabled by the aforementioned work, it does not suffice, since it is equally important to understand the data being produced. As the number of ICOs will by far exceed the number of Internet hosts, we will have to include mechanisms to (1) exchange data in a uniform format, which is as flexible as IP (at the networking level) to serve a wide range of requirements and applications and to (2) provide means for automatic interpretation and understanding of the transported data (semantics). Such a data exchange layer will be crucial to enable scalability from an application's point of view as nobody will be able to deal with the number of ICOs - and the even larger amount of data they produce - efficiently and scalable without such a layer. The necessary technologies are already being developed and deployed: Linked Data and the Resource Description Format (RDF) are accepted standards in the Web and provide a general model. RDF is flexible enough to express whatever is required by applications in simple subject-predicate-object terms. These triples are the basic units of information, which can be connected arbitrarily and enable an Internet-wide database model of information. In this talk, ongoing work and open research problems in this domain will be presented which aim at enabling novel ways for humans to interact with their environment and facilitating interactions among entities of the physical world (Internet of Things). As this requires the combination of approaches from diverse areas - Semantic Web, Linked Data, databases, sensor networks, etc. - the talk will specifically focus on cross-domain problems and open research questions and outline a research agenda to address them.

Speaker biography:

Manfred Hauswirth (http://www.manfredhauswirth.org/) is Vice-Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland and professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He holds an M.S. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna. His main research interests are on semantic sensor networks, sensor networks middleware, large-scale semantics-enabled distributed information systems and applications, peer-to-peer systems, Internet of Things, self-organization and self-management, Semantic Web services, and distributed systems security. He has published over 100 papers in these domains, he has co-authored a book on distributed software architectures and several book chapters on P2P data management and semantics. He has served in over 170 program committees of international scientific conferences and was program co-chair of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing in 2007, general chair of the Fifth European Semantic Web Conference in 2008, and is program co-chair of the 10th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE) and of the 12th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE) in 2011. He is a member of IEEE and ACM and is on the board of WISEN, the Irish Wireless Sensors Enterprise Led Network, the scientific board of the Corporate Semantic Web research center at FU Berlin, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Sensor Web Technologies (CLARITY) in Dublin, Ireland.

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