Archive

Besides the largest source of information ever, the Web is moving towards becoming a Web of globally accessible services. Both static data and services available on the Web still lack machine-understandable semantics such that they can be used in an automated way. It is the mission of the IRIS research unit to define languages for describing data and Web services, and to build software components to reason about these data and service descriptions in order to make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality.

This research unit aims to apply Semantic Web technologies to solve various real life problems and seek to provide better solutions. The key tasks are:

• adding, managing and mining semantics in Social Web
• engineering ontologies and semantics for multimedia objects
• providing ontology management environment based on WSMT
• semantic searching and retrieving

This research unit works on transferring Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services technology to research problems in Business Information Systems, in order to bridge the gap between the fundamental work yielded by the Formal Ontology and Semantic Web communities on one hand and the application-oriented challenges of BIS/MIS as a discipline on the other hand.

The mission of the Service Web Intelligence unit is to establish semantics as the core pillar for future service web infrastructures and develop service models, algorithms and tools which will ease the usage of services in the future service web environment.

This research unit elaborates on the challenges of services in the emerging field of Ubiquitous Computing. This includes research on service description, discovery, distribution, deployment, composition and execution in Ubiquitous Computing environments. An important aspect is the area of ontology-based context modeling and retrieval as a key enabler of context-aware service discovery and execution technology in Ubiquitous Computing environments.