November 2005 - sem-grd - lists.ogf.org

GGF16 Semantic Grid workshop
by David De Roure 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

Colleagues Just to let you know we are proposing to hold a Semantic Grid workshop at GGF16, which is in Athens, February 13-16, 2006. This will be the first GGF Semantic grid workshop in Europe, and I believe the timing is good as many e-Science projects and IST programme Grid projects now have some very interesting and useful Semantic grid experiences to share with the community. More information will be available in a few days, but I wanted to let you know now so that you can pencil this into your diaries. Thanks -- Dave

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GGF DAIS(database access) specification for RDF databases?
by Isao Kojima 29 Nov '05

29 Nov '05

Dear Semantic Grid RG members; We are proposing to discuss GGF DAIS(Database Access and Integration Service) specification for RDF databases. As you know, DAIS working group is discussing the WS based interface to access distributed/remote database systems. The specification almost completed is WS-DAI(Database Access and Integration) in which Relational, XML, Object Databases and Files will be accessed in a single WS-DAI framework. DB specific functions are defined by separate specs like WS-DAIR(Relational) and WS-DAIX(XML) as functional extensions to the core WS-DAI. Based on this approach, we want to discuss about WS-DAI-RDF specification to handle RDF databases. As you also know, W3C is discussing the RDF standard query language SPARQL and several RDF databases like Jena and Sesame support the language. W3C is also discussing the wsdl based access protocol for SPARQL and this should cope with GGF WS-DAIs. AIST has several RDF related database R&D projects and we strongly feel the importance of DAIS specification for RDF databases which assumes future standard SPARQL. I think this issue can be discussed within DAIS-WG, however, handling RDF database within the grid middleware such as WS-RF and OGSA-DAI seems to be very important to the people of this RG. If you are interested in this topic, please mail me(or to this ml) We have a plan to have a Bof in GGF16 at Athens. Sincerely Isao -------------------------------------------- Isao Kojima Leader Data Grid Team Grid Technology Research Center A.I.S.T. Japan

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Three Semantic Grid Research Positions at University of Aberdeen
by Pete Edwards 28 Nov '05

28 Nov '05

Computing Science University of Aberdeen Research Positions in Semantic Grid Technologies Postdoctoral Research Fellow Postgraduate Research Assistants/PhD Studentships (2) The closing date for the receipt of applications is 14th December 2005 Three vacancies are available immediately within the PolicyGrid project (http://www.policygrid.org) - one of the ESRC National Centre for eSocial Science (http://www.ncess.org) research nodes, located at the University of Aberdeen. The Node brings computer scientists and social scientists together to focus on the challenges of using Semantic Grid technologies to enable more powerful analysis of mixed-method data (e.g. surveys and interviews, case studies, simulations) thus adding significant value to the work of social scientists engaged in the analysis of evidence bases for policy development and evaluation. It expands upon the work of an earlier ESRC-funded pilot demonstrator project at Aberdeen (Fearlus-G http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/research/fearg/) Node activities will include new methods for querying and presenting results from Semantic Web resources, methods for metadata creation, techniques for creation of evidence structures from heterogeneous Grid services, workflow tools, and explicit characterisations of agent-based simulations. Research Fellow This postdoctoral position is being offered on a full-time basis for 36 months. The post holder will focus on development of ontology support for annotation of social simulation models, together with a toolset to facilitate design, execution, analysis and interpretation of simulation experiments. You will also be engaged in other ontology authoring activities (as required) and will be expected to contribute to the research agenda for the Node. The work will entail extensive collaboration with land-use modelling experts at the Macaulay Institute and other members of the social simulation community. You will also be encouraged to play an active role as a member of the PolicyGrid team and the wider e-science group within Aberdeen Computing Science. In addition, your role will involve liaison with the National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS) located at the University of Manchester. You should have a PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline. You are expected to be a highly competent programmer in Java, and have experience of Semantic Web technologies (including OWL and RDF), Web/Grid services, e-science, and related areas. Knowledge of workflow approaches in e-science would be desirable. Prior knowledge in the agent-based simulation area is not essential, but would be an asset. The work will involve conceptual/theoretical work, and also implementation of demonstrable system software. Salary will be at an appropriate point on the Research 1A Salary Scale (£20,044 - £26,470 per annum) with placement according to qualifications and experience. Research Assistants Two postgraduate research assistant positions are offered on a part time (50% FTE) basis for 36 months; they will focus on two workpackages: "Integrated Quantitative and Qualitative Data Analysis for Policy Development & Appraisal" and "Facilitating Access for Policy-Makers: A Natural Language Approach to Query Formulation and Information Presentation". If appointed, it is a condition that you will be required to undertake postgraduate research leading to an MPhil/PhD degree, in an area related to the research activities of the PolicyGrid Node. For both posts you should have an excellent Honours degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, and preferably an MSc. You are expected to be a competent programmer in Java, and have knowledge/experience of distributed information management (including ontologies). Prior knowledge in the area of social science is not essential, but would be an asset. Both posts will involve conceptual/theoretical work, and also implementation of demonstrable system software. For the "Integrated Data Analysis" post you should ideally have knowledge and experience of Web/Grid services and e-science; for the post assigned to the "Natural Language" workpackage it would be desirable for you to have knowledge and experience of natural language processing/generation and user-interface design. Salaries will be at an appropriate point on the RA1B Research salary scale (£20,044 - £22,289 pro rata per annum) with placement according to qualifications and experience. Informal and confidential enquiries should be directed to: Dr Peter Edwards PolicyGrid Node Director email: pedwards(a)csd.abdn.ac.uk tel: + 44 (0)1224 272052 Application forms and further information are available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/jobs The University pursues a policy of equal opportunities in the appointment and promotion of staff. -- Head of Graduate School College of Physical Sciences University of Aberdeen Aberdeen AB24 3UE Reclaim Your Inbox! http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird

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CFP: International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW'06)
by Luc Moreau 21 Nov '05

21 Nov '05

Apologies for cross-postings. Please send to interested colleagues. CALL FOR PAPERS International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW'06) Chicago, Illinois, USA May 3-5, 2006 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm/IPAW06 Introduction ------------ This workshop is a follow-up to workshops in Chicago in October 2002 (http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/provenance/) and in Edinburgh in December 2003 (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/304/) It will further investigate the issues of data provenance, process documentation, data derivation, and data annotation. In scientific and business workflows, typically data is repeatedly copied, corrected, and transformed as it passes through numerous databases or services. Understanding where data has come from and how it arrived in a database or filestore is of crucial importance to the trust a user will put in that data, yet this information is seldom captured properly. The importance of provenance goes well beyond verification; it is closely related to archiving and annotation, also important in the context of scientific and business data. Moreover, it may be used in data discovery. Knowing the provenance of a data item may help a user to make connections with other useful data. Alternatively, a user may want to understand a derivation in order to repeat it with modified parameters, and being able to describe a derivation may help a user to discover whether a particular kind of analysis has already been performed. Annotation is closely related to provenance. End users do more than produce and consume data: they comment on it and refer to it, and to the results of queries upon it. Annotation is therefore an important aspect of communication. One user may want to highlight a point in data space for another to investigate further. They may wish to annotate the result of a query such that similar queries show the annotation. Information for Authors ----------------------- IPAW'06 encourages the submission of theoretical, experimental, methodological, and applications papers related to the issue of provenance and annotation. Papers should be no longer than 8 pages (lncs column format). Submissions will be peer reviewed and selected for presentation at the workshop; papers will be evaluated on the basis of the quality of their technical contribution, originality, soundness, significance, presentation, understanding of the state of the art, and overall quality. There will be proceedings published after the workshop (publisher TBC). Submission instructions ----------------------- To be added here. Topics of interest ------------------ Topics of interest to IPAW'06, include but are not limited to: * models of provenance and annotation * applications requiring provenance, uses cases, methodologies * provenance systems, functionality, protocols, implementation * relationship between provenance, annotation and metadata * provenance-based reasoning and Semantic Web techonologies * relationship between workflows, processes and provenance * security considerations for provenance * scalability issues * granularity of provenance * legal issues relating to provenance * provenance, business processes and compliance Important Dates --------------- Submission deadline: February 10, 2006 Acceptance Notification: March 6, 2006 IPAW'06 date: May 3-5, 2006 Location -------- Chicago, Illinois, downtown Sheraton hotel. Provisional Programme Committee ------------------------------- * Dave Berry, National e-Science Centre, UK * Peter Buneman, University of Edinburgh, UK * Ian Foster (co-chair), Argonne National Lab/University of Chicago, USA * Jim Hendler, University of Maryland, USA * Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK * Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA * Luc Moreau (co-chair), University of Southampton, UK * Jim Myers, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, USA * Mike Wilde, Argonne National Lab/University of Chicago, USA

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sem-grd welcome message
by David De Roure 12 Nov '05

12 Nov '05

For a while now we've been sending out a new welcome message when people join this list, and someone pointed out to me that I should send this to all the "older" members too! The message is below for info. -- Dave Subject: Welcome to the Semantic Grid community Hello Thanks for subscribing to the sem-grd list. This mailing list supports the Semantic Grid community and is hosted by the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a forum for the international community leading the pervasive adoption of grid computing in research and industry. For further information about Semantic Grid, see www.semanticgrid.org GGF has a community activity known as the Semantic Grid Research Group (SEM-RG) which holds workshops and sessions at GGF events. Although this list carries discussion related to the activies of that group, it is not exclusive - GGF hosts the list for the benefit of the broader community and all aspects of Semantic Grid, and other Semantic Grid community events, are in scope for discussion here. We always welcome information for the semanticgrid.org Web site, such as calls for papers and event announcements. If you post announcements to the list, we can also put them on the Web Site - or send them to me dder(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk directly and I'll do both. GGF also provides a range of other community activities in the Grid computing area - see www.ggf.org for further information. If you are running an event you might be interested in doing it in conjunction with GGF - please contact us for further information. Regards -- Dave (also on behalf of Carole Goble and Geoffrey Fox) Prof David De Roure phone +44 (0)23 8059 2418 Head of Grid and Pervasive Computing fax +44 (0)23 8059 2865 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton email dder(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK http://www.soton.ac.uk/~dder/

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CFP: Special Issue FGCS on Life Science Grids for Biomedicine and Bioinformatics
by David De Roure 12 Nov '05

12 Nov '05

************************************************************************* * Call for papers for the Special issue * * * * Life Science Grids for Biomedicine and Bioinformatics * * * * Future Generation Computer System * * Elsevier * * http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/misc/lifesciencegrid05.doc * * * ************************************************************************* IMPORTANT DATES Submission for manuscripts: December 15, 2005 Acceptance notification: January 28, 2006 Due date of revised manuscripts: February 28, 2006 Approximate date of publication: Spring, 2006 Purpose of the Special Issue ---------------------------- Omics technologies (genomics - DNA, transcriptomics - RNA, proteomics - protein, metabolomics - metabolite and phenomics �V phenotype, etc.) and medical informatics have changed the arena of life sciences research forever. They allow generation of data at a large-scale, which started with the whole-genome followed by micro-array gene-expression analysis, mass spectrometry of proteins and metabolites, biomedical imaging processing and health care. Omics technologies require substantial paradigm shifts for the way life sciences research is carried out. Biological experiments are relatively expensive, which forces scientists to focus on advanced design for experimentation as part of a whole-chain research approach. Furthermore, the data generally contains information outside the scope of the original experiment. Hence, to maximize scope of experiments, biological data needs to be reusable, shareable and suitable for in-silico experiments. All of this poses high demands on annotation of data and standardization of data formats. Furthermore, the conversion of data into information and knowledge to support scientists answering biological questions, requires advanced analysis methods and tools that enable mining and integrating these complex datasets. The bottlenecks for life sciences have shifted from data generation to data storage, pre-processing, analysis, and interpretation. The current challenge is to remove these bottlenecks by a combination of life sciences and information technology (IT). The effective and efficient management and use of stored data, and in particular the transformation of these data into information and knowledge, is thus a key requirement for success in Life Sciences, as already has been recognized in many others sectors such as industry, science, government. Life Science Grids are based on the integration of emerging technologies such as Grids, Bioinformatics, Web/Grid Services, Workflow, Semantic Web, to support applications and research in different fields of Life Sciences, such as Health Care, Biomedicine, Computational Chemistry. They promise to provide reliable and secure computing infrastructures facilitating the seamless use of distributed datasets, bioinformatics tools and systems, data mining applications, and knowledge, building a so-called Grid Problem Solving Environment (G-PSE), for solving complex problems in Biomedicine and Health Care. The scope of this special issue is to focus on challenge, applications and services in modern Life Science Grid computing environments. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following: - Grid solutions for Life Science applications - Grid infrastructures for bio data analysis - Parallel bio data-intensive applications - Grid infrastructures, middleware and tools for Life Science Grids - Web Services for Life Science Grids - Workflow for Life Science Grids - Semantic Grid for Life Science applications - Bio data analysis and management - Databases and the grid in biomedical field - Data grids for biomedicine and bioinformatics - Data mining of truly large and high-dimensional bio data sets - Security in bio data grids - Biology, Biochemistry and Biomedicine for Grid Environments - Drug Design - Protein Folding - Systems Biology - Genome informatics and phylogeny Guest Editors ------------- Giovanni Aloisio University of Lecce, Italy giovanni.aloisio(a)unile.it Vincent Breton CNRS/IN2P3, LPC Clermont-Ferrand, France breton(a)clermont.in2p3.fr Maria Mirto University of Lecce, Italy maria.mirto(a)unile.it Almerico Murli University of Naples, Italy almerico.murli(a)dma.unina.it Tony Solomonides University of West of England, UK Tony.Solomonides(a)uwe.ac.uk Important Dates --------------- Paper submission deadline December 15, 2005 Notification of acceptance January 28, 2006 Camera-ready papers February 28, 2006 Desired publication End of 2006

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IMPORTANT: Server Fire Affects WWW2006 Submission - Please Read@cs.man.ac.uk
by Carole Goble 02 Nov '05

02 Nov '05

*** PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON RESPONSIBLY TO ALL COLLEAGUES WHO *** MAY BE CONSIDERING SUBMITTING PAPERS/PANELS/TUTORIALS TO WWW2006. *** PLEASE EMAIL YOUR TRACK PC MEMBERS AND ASK THEM TO PASS THE MESSAGE ON *** BUT DO NOT USE THE OFFICIAL WWW2006.ORG MAILING LISTS! Due to a serious fire at the University of Southampton, UK, the www2006.org website and mailing lists are temporarily unavailable. We expect that services will return soon (and may even be restored by the time you read this email). In the meantime we apologise for any confusion that the outage may have caused. THE SUBMISSION PROCESSES have been unaffected by this fire, only information about the submission url, deadlines, tracks, document formatting etc has been affected. A temporary replacement website has been set up with all the information for submitting papers, panels and tutorials. The paper deadline still stands at midnight November 4th 2005, Hawaiian time. The panel and tutorial submission deadlines are also unchanged. TEMPORARY WWW2006 WEBSITE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ but SHOULD be visible at www2006.org DIRECT ACCESS to the paper submission website: http:// www.openconf.org/www2006/ TEMPORARY EMAIL FOR ENQUIRIES: lescarr(a)gmail.com Information about the fire can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/england/hampshire/4390048.stm. --- WWW2006 Co-chairs: Les Carr, Dave De Roure, Arun Iyengar WWW2006 PC Chairs: Carole Goble, Mike Dahlin

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