RICERCA ITALIANA     

ESTEEM: Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents - Advanced methods and tools for semantic cooperation in Web virtual communities

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

Nowadays everything is global (and dynamic): global economics, global environment, global food, global market. Thus, global information. The time is over when data were residing on the enterprise central information system. Currently, all major organizations have decentralized structures and their information systems handle a variety of information sources. Actually, information systems have long been playing around. The problem of how to provide transparent access to heterogeneous information sources while maintaining their autonomy already appeared decades ago and has been almost solved by information integration techniques, where interaction between clients and data sources is trough a centralized access point and uniform query interfaces give users the illusion of being querying an homogeneous system. However, these techniques work under certain hypotheses, including moderately static scenarios, shared understanding of the domain of interest (in form of global schema or ontology), a closed, or at least access-controlled, set of participating sources. All these hypotheses do not hold anymore in the current evolving web of millions of autonomous information nodes (peers) which need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data or services). Information has thus to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting peers do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand, and do not have a complete picture of the context where the >>>

Principal Investigator

Tiziana CATARCI Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

Integrating and coordinating heterogeneous and distributed contents in open information systems over the Web is one of the crucial challenges at the current evolutionary stage of IT infrastructure. Nowadays, any kind of internetworking community needs a coordinated and virtualized access to distributed information resources, which range from proprietary ones to publicly available on the Web. Traditional information integration techniques, where interaction between clients and information sources is trough a centralized access point, provide only a partial solution to the new challenging issues that arise in the presence of a network of autonomous information nodes (called sources, sites, agents, or peers) which need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data, documents, services). Here, peer interaction cannot be controlled in a centralized way, and the issue of cooperation, integration and coordination among different parties has to be addressed on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis.

In this context, semantic information sharing, rather than information processing or just syntactic exchange à la XML, is one of the information technology primary goals. Semantics is particularly important because peers interacting in open environments do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand. Lack of common background generates the need for explicit guidance in understanding the exact meaning of data, hence the growing importance of ontologies >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Semantic interoperability in open networked systems is one of the primary goals of these years.
Semantics is particularly important because information and services have to be sharable in open environments where interacting nodes (sources, sites, agents) do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world. In a recently proposed scenario [Aberer et al., 2004], parties interact in a P2P environment dynamically negotiating trustful agreements on common interpretations within the context of a given task. Aggregation of local agreements leads to the creation of virtual communities that share a common understanding of the world. This particular form of semantic interoperability above described is referred to as "emergent semantics".
In order to fulfill such a scenario, results from several research areas need to be integrated and extended.
P2P systems are currently evolving toward sharing of rich contents. In such open environments, lack of common background generates the need for explicit guidance in discovering available resources and knowledge. Ontologies supply a common basis for various research areas, wherever semantics is involved. In particular, their use as means to share descriptions of available resources is being investigated for content discovery in P2P systems. This is also true for service discovery on the web. A notion of semantic GRID is also emerging.
Beside information discovery, a fundamental issue is how to integrate >>>