Invited Speakers and Tutorials

Leo Bertossi

School of Computer Science, Carleton University

Tutorial: Semantic Constraints for Data Quality Assessment and Cleaning - slides in .pdf format

Abstract: Data quality is an increasingly important issue and concern in business intelligence. Data quality is most of the time a relative property since it largely depends on additional semantic information and metadata. In this tutorial we will review how semantic conditions expressed by means of integrity constraints, quality constraints, and contextual information can be used to characterize, assess and obtain quality data.

Bio Sketch: Leopoldo Bertossi has been Full Professor at the School of Computer Science, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) since 2001. He is Faculty Fellow of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies (IBM Toronto Lab). He obtained a PhD in Mathematics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC) in 1988. He has been the theme leader for "Adaptive Data Quality and Data Cleaning" of the "NSERC Strategic Network for Data Management for Business Intelligence" (BIN), a project that involves more than fifteen academic researchers across Canada plus several industrial partners. Prof. Bertossi's research interests include database theory, data integration, peer data management, semantic web, intelligent information systems, data quality for business intelligence, knowledge representation, logic programming, and computational logic.

Erhard Rahm

Database Group, University of Leipzig

Invited Talk: Evolution and merging of real-life ontologies - slides in .pdf format

Abstract: Ontologies are in wide-spread use in diverse domains. In life sciences, many large ontologies are used to annotate biomedical entities and perform analysis tasks such as functional profiling or term enrichment. On the web, simple ontologies such as web directories or product catalogs are heavily used for improved content categorization and search. These ontologies are subject to significant reorganizations and other evolutionary changes. There is thus an increasing need to better deal with ontology evolution, in particular to support the automatic detection of evolution mappings and to automate the migration of ontology instances and ontology-based mappings. Another common task is to combine or merge multiple related ontologies. In the talk we present new Match-based approaches to determine a Diff and a Merge between ontologies. The proposed COntoDiff scheme is rule-based and determines compact evolution mapping consisting of expressive change operations. We also point out open challenges for future work.

Bio Sketch: Erhard Rahm is a full professor for computer science at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He chairs the database group and a new innovation lab on Web Data Integration (WDI Lab). His Ph.D. and habilitation degrees are from the University of Kaiserslautern. He held visiting research positions at IBM Research and at Microsoft Research. His current work areas include data integration, metadata management and bioinformatics. Professor Rahm published numerous peer-reviewed research papers and authored or co-edited several books, including the 2011 Springer book on "Schema Matching and Mapping". At VLDB 2011, he will receive the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award for a paper on schema matching.

VS Subramahnian

Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland

Title: Querying and Reasoning about Massive Social Networks - slides in .pdf format

Abstract: Companies and organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the value of social networks to their businesses. In this talk, I will discuss results on three kinds of problems related to social networks. First, I will briefly summarize methods to query social networks using subgraph matching query paradigms. Though subgraph matching is intractable, I will briefly discuss cloud based approaches that can process complex subgraph queries on real social networks of over one billion edges in under a second. Second, I will discuss a class of problems called social network optimization problems - problems related to allocating resources across a social network, taking a diffusion model of some phenomena into account. Finally, I will discuss a class of problems called competitive diffusion problems - how does a phenomenon diffuse across a network when there are competing diffusions occurring at the same time. Parts of this talk reflect joint work with Matthias Broecheler, Andrea Pugliese, and Paulo Shakarian.

Bio Sketch: V.S. Subrahmanian is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Digital International Government and Co-Director of the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland where he has been on the faculty since 1989. He has worked extensively on databases and artificial intelligence and has co-authored over 200 papers as well as several books. He has served on the editorial board of several journals, has won numerous awards, and delivered invited talks at numerous conferences. His work has been extensively cited both in the academic literature as well as in the press.

Paolo Papotti

Università Roma Tre

Tutorial: Emerging Applications for Schema Mappings - slides in .pdf format

Abstract: In the last years, schema mapping management has become an important research area in data transformation, exchange and integration systems. Important results have been consolidated and the main ideas have been translated into products. However, despite the good results, the adoption of mapping systems in real-life integration applications, such as ETL workflows or EII, has been quite slow. Two emerging trends are overcoming the limits of the initial proposal and are going to encourage the developing of more systems based on schema mappings. On one side, novel theoretical results are paving the way to the creation of innovative applications for real world problems. On the other side, a new generation of tools for the creation and optimization of schema mappings are widening the opportunities offered by such technology. In this tutorial we quickly present schema mapping languages and their current applications. We then move to the recent advances and to the new research opportunities that they are opening..

Bio Sketch: Paolo Papotti is assistant professor at Università Roma Tre. He received his PhD from Università Roma Tre in 2007, with a thesis on model management and generic data translation among different data models. He had visiting appointments at IBM Almaden Research Center, University of Santa Cruz and Università della Basilicata. His research interests include schema mappings, data exchange and information extraction.