[DL] new submission dates for SEMANTICS FOR GRID DATABASES

[Carole Goble]

*apologies for multiple postings*

CONFERENCE ON SEMANTICS FOR A NETWORKED WORLD:
SEMANTICS FOR GRID DATABASES

June 17-19, 2004, Paris, France

Due to a number of requests we have extended the deadline for full paper submissions to

30th March 2004

*this is a hard deadline*

New Important Dates:
Submission Deadline:	March 30, 2004
Notification of acceptance:	April 29, 2004
Camera Ready Copy for Pre-Proceedings:	May 26, 2004

http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/communication/conferences/2004/IC-SNW/

Organized by the IFIP Working Group on Databases (2.6)
In Cooperation with SIGMOD 2004, June 13-18, Paris, France

The explosion in data exchange fostered by the success of the Web has restated semantics as a kernel issue in the development of services providing data and information to users and applications worldwide. This newly designated conference series on "Semantics for the Networked World" unifies into a single framework the previous series on "Database Semantics" and "Visual Database Systems" that the IFIP WG 2.6 has been offering since 1985. The intent for the series remains to explore novel emerging trends that raise interesting research issues related to the understanding and management of semantics. Each conference edition, while also hosting contribution of generic relevance in the semantics domain, will focus on a specific theme that conveys exciting promises of innovation. 

The theme for the 2004 edition is Semantics for Grid Databases. Grid computing is indeed a new field concentrating on ``flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources - what we refer to as virtual organizations" ("The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations" by Foster, Kesselman and Tuecke). Grid computing has gathered substantial momentum in order to provide science with shared infrastructures for performing large-scale scientific computations and data analysis. Similarly, P2P computing attracted substantial attention to realize large-scale information sharing applications, including scientific information. Substantial attention is currently devoted to the provision of middleware services to make computational resources interoperable at the technical level and to increase the efficiency of use of physical resources. 

As the grid computing infrastructure is being increasingly adopted by the scientific and business communities, it is likely to have typical problems of information overload that manifest themselves in any large scale infrastructure for information and application sharing (e.g., the WWW). Information resource discovery, and the need for application and service interoperability, integration and composition manifest themselves in these infrastructures. The ability to interoperate at the semantic level, between Grid middleware services and applications, within and across Grids will largely determine the continued success of Grid based computing. 

Approaches to represent semantics include descriptions of Grid resources in a domain and application specific manner represented as metadata in a standardized and possibly formal language, for e.g., XML/RDF. Techniques that leverage these semantic descriptions need to be explored and investigated and will be the primary focus of this conference. Approaches for creating these semantic descriptions in a semi-automated manner are also crucial for scaling and enabling the feasibility of semantic interoperation. Investigation of self-organizing, bootstrapping and emergent approaches for creating and utilizing these semantic descriptions is also an important workshop theme.

Therefore this working conference will focus on issues of semantic interoperability of the information and services provided and manipulated by Grid and P2P computing systems. This includes both issues of domain modelling, formal representation of knowledge, transmission and display of data etc., and issues of user interfacing, process modelling, architectures to support integrity, consistency and reuse, or reports and prototypes illustrating issues and solutions for such system that are relevant from a perspective of semantic interoperability.

The purpose of the Conference, as its predecessors, is to provide an active forum for researchers and practitioners for presentation and exchange of research results and practical management of databases, this time applied to large-scale systems used for managing and sharing scientific information.  By organizing this conference, we want to encourage researchers and practitioners to submit original contributions and case studies that elucidate semantic issues.

Topics of interest for the special theme include (but are not restricted to):

* Semantics and Grid computing
* Semantic interoperability
* Data quality
* Scalable integration
* Grid and P2P computing
* Curated scientific databases
* Data visualization and provenance
* Self-organisation and emergent behaviour in semantic Grid systems
* Semantics in data virtualization
* Semantics in Grid applications
* Semantics for Grid service matchmakers and brokers
* Scalability, robustness and adaptability in semantic Grid systems
* Grid-awareness by semantic services
* Deployment of semantic services in Grids
* 
Topics of interest for the conference also include (but are not restricted to) semantic issues related to the following:

* Data modelling and query languages
* Semantic foundations
* Knowledge discovery and data mining
* Semantic Web
* Semantics in standardization
* Semantic elicitation in XML frameworks
* Knowledgeable user interfaces
* Industrial application challenges 
* Access control, privacy, and security
* Role and use of ontologies
* Spatial, temporal, multimedia and contextual data management
* Semantics Engineering, Reverse Engineering
* Visualization of Semantics


General Chair: Mokrane Bouzeghoub, University of Versailles, France 

PC Co-Chairs: 
Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK, carole at cs.man.ac.uk
Vipul Kashyap, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA, kashyap at nlm.nih.gov
Stefano Spaccapietra, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, stefano.spaccapietra at epfl.ch

Steering Committee: 
Tiziana Catarci, University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy
Karl Aberer, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland 
Marc Scholl, University of Konstanz, Germany