co-located with ESEC/FSE 2007
3 September 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia
The workshop was cancelled by the Organizing Committee and it will be re-scheduled within another context.
Workshop's description
Technologies, originally developed by the Semantic Web community, such as ontologies and RDF graphs, have turned out to be useful also in other domains. Software Engineering, Business Processes or application integration on the user's desktop take advantage of the possibility to model the domain in a machine process-able way through ontologies. More and more services come into use that use these Semantic Web technologies; Services such as RDF databases, inference engines, messaging systems.
Whereas these services are getting mature, the infrastructure to integrate these services are not well investigated. Therefore, a novel middleware architecture is needed that integrates the services in an open framework; Services such as lifting proprietary application data to semantic structures, routing data based on semantic information, semantic inter-process communication, and storing, retrieval, and linking of extracted meta-data. Therefore, the Semantic Web community as well as the Software Engineering community are challenged to investigate this field and to come up with an architecture and middleware support for the integration of semantically enriched services. These challenges comprise, i.e.:
- Using Ontologies in the Software Architecture shifts the engineering from the software design to ontology design. Significant behavior within the system might be modeled by ontologies. What is an appropriate methodology and tool support for such an ontology driven architecture?
- What will be the core set of services which denotes a semantic middleware?
- Services will define methods that might use RDF graphs as parameters or return values. How to describe the RDF data (or ontological concepts) in the interface description?
Together, these technologies provide a means to build the semantic bridges necessary for data exchange and application integration. On the Semantic Desktop the integration of these technologies is already advanced and offers a good area to test scenario for the practicability to a semantic middleware. The Semantic Desktop will transform the conventional desktop into a seamless, networked working environment, by loosening the borders between individual applications and the physical workspace of different users.
Workshop's goals
The goal of this workshop is to start a discussion between the relevant communities, such as the semantic community, the software engineering community and the open-source community. The expertise of these communities in terms of architecture, design, development and implementation for a semantic middelware will help to achieve this vision of an open framework that should be exploited on the Semantic Desktop.
The workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioner from the semantic web, semantic desktop, the software engineering and the open-source communities to discuss various aspects of architecture, design, development and implementation issues of the Semantic Desktop.
Topics of interest
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- Semantic driven software engineering for a semantic middleware
- Communication protocols, data exchange formats, data exchange interfaces on the basis of RDF
- Tools developed or being developed for Software Engineering for the semantic middleware
- Shortcomings of the current semantic desktop approaches with respect to Software Engineering
- Standardization of semantic desktop architecture
- Engineering techniques and semantic desktop tools or languages
- Methodology and tool support for a semantic middleware
- Application of UML for the Design of a semantic middleware
- Software specification for a semantic middleware
- Ontology Driven Architectures for a semantic middleware
- Semantic Middleware use on the Semantic Desktop
- Middleware Communications, Infrastructure for Semantically and Rich Data-excahange.
- Core set of services that denote a Semantic Desktop
- Service Oriented Architecture for the Semantic Desktop
- Description of RDF data (or ontological concepts) in the interface description
- Semantic Web enebled peer-to-peer systems
