International IFIP Conference on Artificial Intelligence Theory and Applications
Keynote:
Semantics and Interoperability
Erich J. Neuhold
Professor, University of Vienna
erich.neuhold@univie.ac.at
Interoperability is a qualitative property of computing infrastructures that denotes the ability of the sending and receiving systems to exchange and properly interpret information objects across program or system boundaries.
Since this property is not given by default as the interoperability problem involves the representation and interpretation of meaning it has been an active research topic for approximately four decades. Database models used schemas to express semantics and implicitly aimed at achieving interoperability by providing programming independence of data storage and access.
After a number of intermediate steps such as Hypertext and XML document models, the notions of semantics and interoperability became what they have been over the last ten years in the context of the World Wide Web and more recently the concept of Open Linked Data.
The talk will investigate the (reoccurring) problem of interoperability as it can be found in the massive data collections around the WEB and Open Linked Data concepts. We investigate semantics and interoperability research from the point of view of information systems. To set the scene an overview of existing old and new interoperability techniques are discussed and future research directions, especially for concepts found in Open Linked Data, and the Semantic WEB are pointed out.
Biography
Erich is currently Honorary (Adjunct) Professor for Computer Science at the University of Vienna and associated with the Fakultaet fuer Informatik. Here he is involved with structured and unstructured multi-media Databases and Web-Information Systems and questions of Semantic enrichment for effective Information Interoperability and Mining. Lately he has been involved in questions of the Semantic Web, Open Linked Data and Big Data and how to use them in solving sustainability issues. He is also investigating problems of interoperability, security and privacy as they arise in those environments and in all the Web 2.0 social communities whether private or professional. Information technology, psychology, social sciences and business aspects all play a role in this environment and are closely interlinked.
Until April 2005 he was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Techno¬logy in Darmstadt and Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) in Darmstadt, Germany an institution of about 120 persons. There he was involved in basic research and applications on all aspects of Information systems and Internet Services, i.e. information and process intensive applications like e-learning, e-government, and e-commerce as well as mobile and location based systems. A number of spin-offs were started during his leadership to exploit the results of IPSI's research.
Earlier he has been Professor at the University of Stuttgart and the Technical University of Vienna and he has also worked in research and management positions for IBM and Hewlett Packard both in Europe and the USA and has graduated about 60 PhD students.
He is a Fellow of IEEE, USA and of the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik, Germany and has received numerous Scientific Awards and Honorary Positions.
He has published four books and about 200 papers. His work has appeared, among others, in the VLDB Journal, Information Systems, Acta Informatica and in many conferences as, for example, VLDB, ICDE, MMDB, ADL, DL,JCDL, IRC, CAiSE, EC-Web, EURASIA etc. He has served and is serving in all capacities on many congress, conference and workshop committees and in national and international governmental and corporate planning and evaluation bodies.
His current home page is at http://cs.univie.ac.at/Erich.Neuhold