Tutorials
List of tutorials:
- T1 - Realizing a Semantic Web Application, Monday, 5th July, 9:00 - 12:30
- T2 - Engineering Web Search Applications, Monday, 5th July, 14:00 - 17:30
- T3 - Web Accessibility - How to overcome the Digital Divide, Tuesday, 6th July, 9:00 - 12:30
- T4 - Design Principles, Patterns and Emerging Technologies for RESTful Web Services, Tuesday, 6th July, 9:00 - 17:30
Presenter
Emanuele Della Valle, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Emanuele Della Valle is an Assistant Professor of “Software Project Management” at the Department of Electronics and Information of the Politecnico di Milano since July 2008. He started CEFRIEL’s Semantic Web Activities in 2001 and he coordinated the Semantic Web group until June 2008. He is co-author of the first Italian book on Semantic Web. He is leading the “Urban Computing” use case and the stream related track of the European Project LarKC. He was Project and Scientific Manager of the European Project Service-Finder. His major research interest is in understanding business strategy and in translating theoretical results into applications. He performs research that is justified and guided by business opportunities. He leaded and participated into several consulting activities related to strategic evolution of distributed information systems, integration of different back-end systems and various feasibility studies for Web portal and document management systems.
Duration
Half Day (Monday, 5th July, 9:00 - 12:30)
Intended audience
People that are aware of OWL, RDF, SPARQL and GRDDL, but that got no time to put together a simple application that uses all those technologies together.
Potential industrial attendees of the conference that would like to understand if Semantic Web technologies are better than Web 2.0 technologies in realizing a complex mash-up. Actually we will show that Semantic Web technologies are better on the data mash-up side, whereas an AJAX-based framework (such as Exhibit) is the best way to present results to the users.
Topic
Is developing mash-ups with Web 2.0 really much easier than using Semantic Web technologies? For instance, given a music style as an input, what it takes to retrieve data from online music archives (MusicBrainz, MusicBrainz D2R Server, MusicMoz) and event databases (EVDB)? What to merge them and to let the users explore the results? Are Semantic Web technologies up to this Web 2.0 challenge? This half-day tutorial shows how to realize a Semantic Web Application we named Music Event Explorer or shortly meex (try it!).
In the scope of this tutorial we show how to use:
- OWL to model the data sources and the application,
- RDF as data model,
- GRDDL to translate XML data sources in RDF models,
- D2RQ to translate relational database in RDF models,
- SPARQL to query the RDF models,
- Joseki as a SPARQL endpoint server to make accessible the RDF data,
- ARQ as SPARQL client,
- Jena as application framework, RDF storage and OWL reasoner, and
- Exhibit as facet browsing Engine.
The tutorial does not require attendees to be familiar with the technologies of the Semantic Web, but only with its vision. The minimal information needed to understand each technology employed in the tutorial is provided during the tutorial itself. A limited understanding of Java should be sufficient to follow the tutorial given that the tutorial will be mainly focused on the Semantic Web side of the problem of developing a Semantic Web application.
Presenters
Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Marco Brambilla is Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione. He collaborates to several research projects related to advanced Web search, business process modeling, Web services, Semantic Web, semistructured data mapping, and web architectures for embedded systems. He graduated in Information Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano in April 2001, achieving a final mark of 100/100 cum laude. In 2005 he got a Ph.D. in Information Engineering at Politecnico di Milano with full marks. He is coauthor of the book “Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications” (Morgan-Kauffman, 2002). The book has been translated in Italy and published by McGraw Hill. He has been visiting researcher at Cisco System (San Josè, CA) in 2001 and at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) in 2004. Several invited seminars on conceptual modeling, Web services, workflow and Web engineering have been given at Harvard University Medical School (Boston, USA), CISCO System (San José, USA), University of California, San Diego (UCSD, USA), Stanford University (Palo Alto, USA), and
Politecnico di Milano (Italy), ESEC/FSE conference (Vrije Univ., Amsterdam).
Alessandro Bozzon, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Alessandro Bozzon is currently a post-doc researcher at Politecnico di Milano. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. His current research interests are in user interaction paradigms, data visualization, and result diversification techniques in multi-domain search over heterogeneous data collections; multimedia content indexing, querying and retrieval; Web technologies (including but not limited to: Web services, service
orchestration, Rich Internet Applications, Mash-up, Semantic Web, etc.), and Web application modeling. He is currently co-responsible for the "Human-computer interfaces for search computing" research track within the Search Computing project. Alessandro Bozzon has been involved in the organization of several scientific events, such as the ICWE 2007 conference, the Pharos Summer School, the Search Computing Challenges and Directions Workshop, and the DATAVIEW 2010 Workshop
Duration
Half Day (Monday, 5th July, 14:00 - 17:30)
Intended audience
The expected audience includes academics and practitioners that are aware of the basics of Web Engineering and would like to understand how these practices can be applied to the case of web search applications.
Topic
With the advent of the Web, search has become the prominent paradigm for information seeking, both across the online space and within enterprises. Search frameworks and components can be used to build search-based applications in diverse vertical fields. However, no precise engineering methods and approaches have been devised for this class of applications.
This tutorial presents the peculiarities of advanced Web search applications, describes some tools and techniques that can be exploited, and offers a methodological approach to development. The approach proposed in this tutorial is based on the paradigm of Model Driven Development (MDD), where models are the core artifacts of the application life-cycle and model transformations progressively refine models to achieve an executable version of the system. To cope with the process-intensive nature of the main interactions (i.e., content analysis, query management, etc.), we describe the use of Process Models (e.g., BPMN models). Indeed, search-based applications are considered as process- and content-intensive applications, due to the trends towards exploratory search and search as a process visions.
The approach will be illustrated on three main classes of search applications: multidomain search, multimedia and multimodal search, and search result explorations.
The tutorial will be organized in three main parts:
- PART: Search applications basics
- Motivations
- Context and definitions
- Classes and examples of search applications
- Open problems, cutting-edge solutions
- Querying and ranking
- Exploratory search
- Result diversity
- PART: Engineering content analysis and indexing
- Unstructured and Semi-Structured Information Retrieval
- Tools for information retrieval. Examples: Lucene and Solr
- Architectures for search applications. Examples: SMILA
- PART: Design Methods for Search Applications
- MDD Design approach
- for analysis and indexing
- for query and result browsing
- Advanced user interfaces for search: design, implementation, and evaluation
Presenter
Mario Batusic, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Mario Batusic studied Theology at the University Gregoriana, Affiliated Institute FTDI in Zagreb, and received his degree in 1988. In the same year he immigrated to Austria. From 1990 to 1993 he worked as commissioner for people with disabilities at the Caritas in Eisenstadt. In 1993 he started to study Computer Science at the University of Linz. Due to economical problems he dropped out of the studies. In 1996 he started to work as a programmer and from 1999 as scientific staff at the institute Integriert Studieren at the University of Linz, where he works in different international and national projects dealing with several aspects of accessibility such as:
- Access to scientific and scholar literature for blind users
- Web Accessibility
- Software Accessibility
- Assistive Technologies.
The results of his research are subject to a number of publications (e.g. ICCHP 1996, ICCHP 2000, AAATE 2001, HCI 2003, ASSETS 2004, ICCHP 2004, HCI 2005, ICCHP 2006, ICALT 2007, AAATE 2007, ASSETS 2007, ICCHP 2008).
Duration
Half Day (Tuesday, 6th July, 9:00 - 12:30)
Intended audience
Web Engineers, Web Designers, Educators in Computer Science
Topic
The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
By Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3 Consortium (W3C).
The main concept enabling us to implement solutions for slogans such as "open society", "inclusion for people with disabilities" and similar, is the concept of "design for all". All products and services including buildings, electronic hardware and software should be designed so, that they either can be used immediately by all or they at least make possible trigging the accessibility gap for the disabled people through assistive technologies.
The concrete application of the "design for all" concept in the Web area bears the name "Web Accessibility". This tutorial offers a general overview of Web Accessibility and an opportunity to discuss all visitors' open issues with this topic. The following main areas will be presented:
- What is Web Accessibility and why we need it:
- The way disabled people access computers and Web
- Specific, disability-conditioned barriers in Web
- Technical causes of the barriers
- Possible solution ways
- Accessibility of classical Web Sites:
- Accessibility of Web Applications:
- The trend in the software development is definitely heading for Web Apps (AJAX, Flash, Silverlight).
- We present the most important techniques for making this new kind of software accessible by applying a new W3C/WAI's semantic web specification Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA).
Presenters
Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Cesare Pautasso is assistant professor in the new Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Previously he was a researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Lab and a senior researcher at ETH Zurich, where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 2004. His research focuses on building experimental systems to explore the intersection of model-driven software composition techniques, business process modeling languages, and autonomic/Grid computing. Recently he has developed an interest in Web 2.0 Mashups and Architectural Decision Modeling. He is the lead architect of JOpera, a powerful rapid service composition tool for Eclipse. His teaching and training activities both in academia and in industry cover advanced topics related to Web Development, Middleware, Service Oriented Architectures and emerging Web services technologies. For more information refer to www.pautasso.info.
Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley, USA
Erik is working in UC Berkeley's School of Information. He has been working on various parts of Web architecture for the past ten years. He first focused on XML and associated technologies, with a focus on data models and representations. For the past two years and as the technical director of the iSchool's Information and Service Design Program (ISD), his focus has shifted to loose coupling and service design. Erik is also very interested in "Location and the Web", the question of how the Web as a hypermedia system should be extended to support location as a first-class concept.
Duration
Full Day (Tuesday, 6th July, 9:00 - 17:30)
Intended audience
Researchers, Practictioners and Graduate Students interested in how to apply the Web in the enterprise.
Topic
Web Services have been of increasing interest in the past years. While "Web Services" were first defined as machine-accessible services based on Web technologies, the term quickly was perceived as exclusively referring to SOAP-based services, which mirror the traditional IT integration style of distributed objects with messaging technologies layered on top of Web technologies. This tutorial focuses on an alternative approach towards the design and implementation of Web Services, based on the architectural style of the Web itself, Representational State Transfer (REST). Thus, the tutorial learning objectives specifically include giving an in-depth understanding on how the two different styles of Web Services compare, and why the decision of SOAP vs. REST is fundamental and needs to be made very early in any SOA project. We focus on the question of how to do SOA with REST, and do so by explaining and highlighting the fundamental differences between the more tightly coupled "integration" style of distributed objects, and the more loosely coupled "cooperation" style of REST. Thus, attendees will gain a new perspective that highlights the importance of following Web principles to support the design of Web Services and learn why not all Web Services are made equal and that only RESTful ones are really "of the Web", whereas others are just implemented "on the Web".
The tutorial will: 1) give a clear introduction to the REST architectural style, 2) present a design methodology for RESTful Web services, 3) discuss what are the main differences between the WS-* and REST technology stacks, 4) show how to compose RESTful services and outline related research challenges; 5) present emerging standard technologies for developing RESTful Web services such as ATOM and ATOMPUB.