|
Photos at the anniversary day!
1988-2008:
From Data to Knowledge An International Seminar Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of EPFL's Database Laboratory (LBD) EPFL September 8, 2008 9:15-20:00 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne with the support of SI-DBTA & SISR The Seminar Twenty years ago, data management mainstream solutions were centralized databases tailored for the application requirements within the owner institution or enterprise. The main concerns were correctness and suitability of the database design for in-house application support and in-depth understanding of database techniques to be able to enhance querying and storage performance as needed. Today the scene has completely changed and focuses on worldwide interoperability, semantic web services for more intelligent support, capturing the meaning of information into domain-oriented ontologies, and management of higher level of aggregate information. The seminar welcomes the contributions of internationally known experts to highlight essential facets of today's and tomorrow's knowledge management solutions. This seminar has been offered free of charge to celebrate our 20th anniversary.. Program 9:15 Welcome & Opening Part I: LBD's Current
Projects 9:30 Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy: Lessons from the GeoPKDD EU Project (slides as pdf file) Invited speakers: Prof. Fosca Giannotti, Prof. Dino Pedreschi, KDD Lab., Pisa, IT Abstract: The technologies of mobile communications and ubiquitous computing pervade our society, and wireless networks sense the movement of people and vehicles, generating large volumes of mobility data. This is a scenario of great opportunities and risks: on one side, mining this data can produce useful knowledge, supporting sustainable mobility and intelligent transportation systems; on the other side, individual privacy is at risk, as the mobility data contain sensitive personal information. A new multidisciplinary research area is emerging at this crossroads of mobility, data mining, and privacy. Our talk assesses this research frontier from a data mining perspective, and illustrates the results of a European-wide research project called GeoPKDD, Geographic Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery,funded by the EU Commission under the FET-Open program. Particular attention will be placed upon privacy-aware geographic knowledge discovery and spatio-temporal data mining from mobility data generated by wireless networks, mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing. 10:30 Coffee Break 11:00 OntoMinD: Tailoring a DBMS to support Ontological Knowledge Speaker: Dr. Lina Al-Jadir, LBD Abstract: A major obstacle to the development of ontologies in support of the Semantic Web is the inability, given current ontology techniques, to handle very large ontologies. Scalability of reasoners is still a very open research issue. We propose a solution to the issue that follows a novel path. We advocate that very large ontologies are best handled using database systems, which have been tuned to provide efficient mechanism to store, update, and manage large volumes of data. To make this possible and meaningful we are augmenting the functionality of a relational DBMS to include the reasoning mechanisms (implemented as stored procedures) that are the essence of ontology management. As a result, a single system is used to store, query, update, and reason about an ontology. We implemented our approach in the OntoMinD prototype. 12:00 Lunch at Le Parmentier Part II: Innovative
Knowledge Technologies 13:30 Knowledge interchange with no limits: the ontology matching challenge (slides as pdf file) Invited speaker: Dr. Jerôme Euzenat, INRIA Grenoble-Rhône-Alpes, FR Abstract: The semantic web is the web where knowledge is formally expressed, often with regard to ontologies. Hence, its first feature is that knowledge can be semantically interpreted. Like the web, it is also huge, heterogeneous and dynamic. These are not problems to be fixed, but features we have to live with. Heterogeneity means that ontologies have to be matched before exploiting the knowledge they hold. In this talk we will present what is new in matching ontologies on the web and, in particular, how to use the semantic and web aspects of the semantic web for dealing with ontology matching. The semantic aspect may be used for amplifying alignments and detecting inconsistencies they may entail. It can also be used for jointly using several alignments. Finally, it can help better evaluating alignments. The web aspect allows taking advantage of many resources (ontologies or alignments) available on the web in order to produce new alignments. It can also be used for serendipitously exploiting user interaction for matching. 14:30 Capturing information digitally while reading on paper (slides as pdf file) Invited speaker: Prof. Moira Norrie, ETH Zürich, CH Abstract: Digital pen and paper technologies make it possible to interact with information services via a paper-based interface. We will provide an introduction to these technologies, describing tools and infrastructure that we have developed to support a rich variety of applications. Then we will discuss ways in which these technologies could be used to capture information digitally while reading paper documents such as newspapers, flight magazines and scientific articles. This discussion will include consideration of ways in which this information might be processed, managed, shared and later retrieved. 15:30 Coffee Break 16:00 Interdisciplinary Information Management: Challenges, Tensions and Pitfalls (slides as pdf file) Invited speaker: Prof. Norman Paton, University of Manchester, UK Abstract: A considerable proportion of the research carried out on information management is in some sense interdisciplinary; either the research is motivated by problems from specific applications, or techniques from different disciplines are brought together to address recognised challenges. In the context of the 20th Anniversary Seminar of the Database Laboratory of EPFL, it can be noted that this laboratory, and many others, work in significant measure across interfaces between disciplines. However, interdisciplinary activities are associated with certain challenges, tensions and pitfalls that need to be recognised both by researchers and by those hoping to benefit from interdisciplinary research. This presentation reflects on distinctive features of interdisciplinary research, and draws some lessons from case studies, which invariably involve both highs and lows. 17:00 Data & Knowledge Modeling: the Next 20 Years (slides as pdf file) Speaker: Prof. Stefano Spaccapietra, LBD Abstract: There is sometimes a feeling that there is not much new to be expected from continued research in data modeling. This talk advocates that instead there is a lot of exciting investigation material to come by simply switching focus from supporting the business world to supporting the scientific community. In the business world database technology has provided solutions for both daily business operation and strategic planning, based on the assumption that business rules dictate how the world is and is to be represented. The database schema is a prescriptive specification and all incoming data has to abide by it. In the scientific world, scientists build hypotheses about their understanding of how the world can possibly be, and making guesses about its behavior. Only part of the available knowledge can be regarded as sure (assessed), the rest is hypotheses that call for experimentation, evaluation, reformulation, refinement, all of that most frequently within a cooperative framework. Current database technology is not fit for such requirements. In particular, current data models lack the concepts that would support working with and further elaborating uncertain knowledge. We can thus foresee a large avenue for new research, that will benefit scientists before the business world captures its result for their own benefit. 18:00 Concluding remarks 18:30 Reception, building BC, 4th floor Acknowledgments We first have to thank the invited speaker for agreeing to reserve a slot in their overbusy schedule to contribute to this event. Their presence makes this event a first class event, and we hope that potential attendees from companies and organizations in Switzerland and beyond will be able to enjoy this unique opportunity to learn about the new information management scene. We are very pleased to express our full gratitude to Patricia Celeste Porto, who designed the leaflet for this event, and to Tiago Celeste Porto who designed the 20 years coin symbolizing the event. The result perfectly illustrates their expertise. Finally, we very warmly thank all the people who made LBD exist and perform successfully over these past 20 years. This includes the present LBD staff, people who have been part of past LBD staff, as well as all our invitees who have shared from one day to one year of their professional life with us in Lausanne. Partial lists can be seen looking at LBD'S PHOTO ALBUM. Please note that these pages are still under construction. Sponsors
|
