Karin Breitman
Semantic Web Technologies: Challenges and Opportunities
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Karin Breitman, will talk about Semantic Web Technologies: Challenges and Opportunities. As the volume of information grows exponentially in the Web, researchers from industry and academia are now exploring the possibility of creating a "Semantic Web," in which meaning is made explicit, allowing machines to process and integrate Web resources intelligently. Central to this idea is the use of ontologies that provide a lingua franca, which allows machines to interact in a meaningful way.

Of course, ontologies have been used as knowledge representation models for a few decades now. The difference is in focus. AI scientists essentially are looking for a representation model of human (consensual) knowledge. A good look at the Cyc and SUO ontologies will show that they might be pretty close to their goal. Nevertheless, they are still facing very hard metaphysical questionings that have been haunting us since the time of Aristotle. Should the ontology be 3D or 4D? Are objects and processes disjointed?

Semantic Web researchers have a more modest goal. We want to create a Web better than the one we have today. Rather than making a science of it, we are looking for engineering solutions that will bring the Semantic Web to being. In this talk we will be exploring the new technologies have emerged as a result of worldwide efforts to create this new Web. Tools to support the edition, integration, merging, alignment, visualization, and verification of ontologies are now available. We focus on the potential opportunities and challenges this technology poses to our Software Engineering practice.

Dr. Karin Breitman received her DSc.in Informatics from the Departamento de Informtica da Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do Rio de Janeiro, where she is currently teaching and continues to work in her research. She received her MSc in System Engineering from COPPE-UFRJ and was awarded "sandwich" grant for her DSc at the Technion, Israel in 1995. She was awarded federal grants for her MSc (CNPq), DSc(Capes), a Enxoval grant (CNPq) and currently holds one of the six national ProDoc-Capes grant in Computer Science. She participates in the Software Engineering for Multi Agent Software Systems Project ESSMA- 552068/2002-0 (CNPq). Her interests are Requirements Engineering, The Semantic Web and Scenario based software development. Her book "The Semantic Web: the future of the Internet" is coming next Fall. She belongs to ACM, IEEE, and the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC), where she currently serves in the Board of Directors as the Special Interest Group and Events Director.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Walt Truszkowski