[sem-grd] CFP: GridSem2004

[David De Roure <dder@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Hello

This workshop at ECAI (the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
in August (Valencia, Spain, August 23 and 24) is being held in conjunction
with the GGF Semantic Grid Research Group.

See http://www.intelligence.tuc.gr/gridsem2004/ for more info. Deadline
is April 19th.  There's a downloadable copy of the call on

	http://www.semanticgrid.org/GridSem2004-call-for-papers.doc

Note the GGF11 (Hawaii) "Applications of Semantic Grid" workshop is
inviting papers on a similar timescale.  The two events have somewhat
different audiences (AI, Grid) and we intend that they are complementary
in giving the Semantic Grid community an opportunity to report different
aspects of their work.

Thanks

-- Dave

GridSem 2004

1st International Workshop on the Semantic Grid

Theme and Call for Papers

The scientific paradigms of the Semantic Web, Software Agents,
Peer-to-Peer Networks and Grid Computing are currently receiving a lot of
attention, and are producing solutions to important problems ranging from
e-science to e-business. The United States, the European Commission, Japan
and other countries have been investing heavily in these technologies
recently.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila (Scientific
American, May 2001), "the Semantic Web aims to bring structure to the
meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software
agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks
for users".

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks a very large number of autonomous computing
nodes (the peers) pool together their resources and rely on each other for
data and services. P2P computing has been recently attracting wide
publicity, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as
Napster, Gnutella and KaZaA and others.

Grid Computing is 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).

The workshop aims to foster international collaboration among the
above areas of research and technological development with the aim to
realize the vision of the Semantic Grid. The workshop is collocated with
the premier European AI conference to emphasize the role of Artificial
Intelligence techniques (e.g., knowledge representation, planning,
learning etc.) in making progress in the above four areas and the ultimate
realization of the Semantic Grid.

One of the key challenges in today's Grids is the need to deal with
knowledge and data sources that are distributed, heterogeneous, and
dynamic, and where effective elicitation of implicit knowledge is a
necessary component of the overall system. In such systems, a complete
global viewpoint or understanding is impossible to achieve - we therefore
need to go beyond centralised knowledge service provision, and develop
effective open, distributed, knowledge-based solutions.

The Semantic Grid aims to overcome this problem by adding meaning
(ontologies, annotations and negotiation processes as studied in the
Semantic Web and Software Agent paradigms) to the Grid. In this way, the
Semantic Grid not only provides a general semantic-based computational
network infrastructure, but a rich, seamless collection of intelligent,
knowledge-based services for enabling the management and sharing of
complex resources and reasoning mechanisms. In the Semantic Grid knowledge
and semantics are deployed explicitly for Grid applications and for the
development of innovative Grid infrastructure. This knowledge-oriented
semantics-based approach to the Grid goes hand-in-hand with the
exploitation of techniques and methodologies from intelligent software
agents representing various components of the virtual organizations and
interacting in a P2P way.

Having articulated the above vision, we should not underestimate the
complexity of realizing the Semantic Grid and fulfilling the expectations
of our users. The Semantic Grid vision can only become a reality if high
quality of service is offered to users and applications at all levels of
the Grid fabric. Research needs to concentrate on issues of quality of
service in the provision of knowledge services and semantic grid services
and attention should be devoted to high-performance, scalability,
resilience to failures, robustness and adaptivity of the proposed systems.

This workshop will bring together key researchers from all over the world
that are working on knowledge representation and ontologies, software
agents, P2P and Grid computing and are interested in working towards the
vision of the Semantic Grid.

Topics of Special Interest

 Semantic Grid applications 
 Ontologies and Grid systems 
 AI planning and scheduling techniques for Grid Computing 
 Grid service matchmakers and brokers 
 Semantics-based P2P systems and Grid computing 
 Multi-agent systems and Grid computing 
 Semantic-Web and Grid computing 
 Scalability, robustness and adaptivity in semantic Grid systems 
 Self-organisation and emergent behaviour in semantic Grid systems 
 Grid-aware knowledge services

Paper Submission

Submitted papers must be original and not submitted for publication
elsewhere. All submitted papers can be up to 15 proceedings pages.
Interested authors should e-mail their papers in postscript or pdf form to
Manolis Koubarakis (manolis@intelligence.tuc.gr) by April 19, 2004.
Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by May 24,
2004. Final versions of papers are due by June 7, 2004.

Revised versions of accepted papers may appear in a special volume
published by a major conference proceedings series (approval pending).