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Distinguished BMAC and ISTEC Lecturer: Professor James Hendler,
Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technology
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory,
University of Maryland
Professor Jim Hendler is a cochair of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group,
a member of the W3C Semantic Web Coordination Group, and the
Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technologies for the
University of Maryland's MIND Laboratory. His work in
the area of the Semantic Web goes back a number of years:
his research group developed SHOE, the first web ontology language,
he was the creator of DARPA's DAML program and helped to create
and participate in the joint committee that created DAML+OIL.
He was the coauthor, along with Tim Berners-Lee and Ora Lassila,
of the widely cited "Semantic Web" article in Scientific American,
and his paper "Is there an Intelligent Agent in Your Future" (Nature, 1999)
was the recipient of the 1999 AAAI Expository Paper Award.
Hendler was also the Conference Chair for the first International
Semantic Web Conference, is one of the vice presidents of the
Semantic Web Science Association, chairs the International
Advisory Board for the Web Semantics Journal, and generally
tries to be around wherever the fun stuff is happening in the
Semantic Web world.
ISTeC Distinguished Lecture:
The Semantic Web -- bringing meaning to the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is often referred to as a web of information,
but is it? When you ask a query on the web you get pointers to
pages, not answers. If you're looking for something beyond text,
you're often unable to find it. The next generation of the Web,
already in the works, aims to fix this by making more of the
content on the web "understandable" to the programs that help
us find, filter and use what is out there. In this talk, I will
describe this new generation of the web, discuss some of the
technologies that will help to power it, and consider some of
the ways in which it may be used to create new and powerful web
applications beyond the capabilities of the current web. I will
also discuss future directions for Semantic Web research.
The Computer Science Distinguished Lecture co-sponsored by ISTeC:
Dynamic Service Choreography on the Semantic Web
In a joint project with Fujitsu Laboratories of American,
the University of Maryland has focused on the semi-automated
composition of Web services and the automated composition of
services using planning technology. Our work is built on top
of the DAML Service (DAML-S) ontologies. We have demonstrated
the grounding of DAML-S in both the Web service Description
Language (WSDL) and the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
device service description. This latter is used in ubiquitous
computing applications as it provides an integration of Web
services with computing on devices such as personal digital
assistants (PDAs) and data tablets. We have developed a
composer that creates a workflow of services that can solve
the user's need in a goal-driven way. The system is also extensible,
any composition generated by the user and the system can be
automatically realized as a DAML-S CompositeProcess, allowing
it to be reused at a later time or used by the system for
composition with other services. This talk describes our
work in Web Service composition, and more generally discussed
the role that semantics can play in the world of Web Services.
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