APWeb 2004 Advanced Seminars
APWeb 2006 features two advanced seminars (90 minutes each). They are free to attend by APWeb 2006 delegates. Tutorial notes will be made available to the participants at the conference registration desk.
Intrinsic Limitations in Context Modelling
Professor Maria Orlowska, University of Queensland, Australia
Keyword Search in Databases
Dr Wei Wang, University of new South Wales, Australia
Advanced Seminar: Intrinsic Limitations in Context Modelling (1 hour 30 minutes)
Professor Maria Orlowska, University of Queensland, Australia
[Abstract] The goal of this presentation is to constructively evaluate the feasibility of expanding the potential for future context-dependent applications.
We begin with a short overview of the generic and inherited limitations of current computational models that form the basis of all computing machines we use and most likely will use for many years to come. We will then continue the debate from the perspective of business process modelling issues where the meaning of “context”, and dependency of applications on “context”, is equally important.
Business process communication is characterized by complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems within an enterprise, and increasingly between trading partners. Each of the involved parties operates in its own individual context, with different perspectives on the overall process.
Most attempts at business process enforcement can be thought of in terms of two basic approaches. The first “coordinative” paradigm is concerned with the enforcement of a structured, “pre-arranged” process. Another approach to process enforcement is concerned with a less structured and a more ad hoc process which is now more commonly quoted since the advent of web services. This is precisely where the use of context specification, discovery or capturing is vital for a realistic chance to deliver any promise. There is a belief that web services will provide a means for integrating applications, promoting interoperability and facilitating loosely-coupled process management over decentralised environments. A natural question that comes to mind: where is the source of the web services power? Why do integration problems, often semantically and contextually sensitive, become easier to handle under these architectural considerations?
Many extensions to the basic web service functionality have been recently proposed with the aim of capturing more meaningful semantics and contexts than simply service invocations, enabling the modelling and implementation of business processes in the web service context. This coordination layer is said to provide web service ‘orchestration’, ‘choreography’ or ‘harmonization’.
Even a superficial analysis of the potential obstacles with deployment, either through coordinative or collaborative approaches for cross-organizational business process support, reveals that the main issues are related to context modelling of the loosely coupled application environments such that global goals are tractably achieved. This talk will highlight the issues outlined above with an attempt to provide well-defined feasibility limits for such context sensitive loosely coupled applications.
[About Speaker] Maria Orlowska the Professor in Information Systems at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Since 1990 she was involved in research work at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, DSTC Pty Ltd, initially as a project leader and since 2000 as a Distinguished Research Fellow. Prof Orlowska served on many international conferences as a PC Chair and over 150 memberships of PCs. She is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals such as, Int Journal of Data and Knowledge Engineering and Int Journal of Internet and Web Information Systems and others. Since 1994 till 2000 she served as a VLDB Endowment trustee as a Far East representative. Her research interests include database system, data mining, workflow technology, eBusiness collaboration, business process modelling and verification, high performance systems, transaction processing, and distributed/integrated databases. Her research contributions appear in over 250 published research papers in peer reviewed international journals and conferences. Twenty-eight PhD students have successfully completed their studies under her supervision.
Keyword Search in Databases (1 hour 30 minutes)
Dr Wei Wang, University of New South Wales, Australia
[Abstract] Recent years have seen increasing interests in searching technology. Web search engines adopt the keyword-based search paradigm and have made the vast amount of information on the World Wide Web available to even casual users.
However, the huge amount of data stored in the database systems can only be searched through complex query languages with non-trivial knowledge about the schema of the data. It will be invaluable for database systems to have full support for keyword-based search. Such capabilities are required by many advanced applications, including customer relation management system (CRM), e-Commerce, enterprise search, business intelligence, anti-terrorism applications and personal information management systems.
This tutorial will provide an overview of issues and challenges of supporting keyword search in database systems. We will survey different approaches proposed in the literature, mainly from a database perspective.[About Speaker] Dr. Wei Wang is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Australia. His current research interests include query processing and optimization for XML, integration of database and information retrieval technologies, data warehousing and OLAP, approximate query processing and data mining. He has published over twenty research papers in these areas in major international conferences.