Guest talk: John Tait

The term Semantic Search is becoming fashionable, but there are a number of problems with the term.

1) There are at least two forms of semantic search. One is based more-or-less hand programmed knowledge sources, like domain ontologies or thesauri. The other is based on emergent properties of the data being searched, using technques like Latent Semantic Analysis or clustering. It is far from clear that the results of applying the two approaches are similar or even compatible.
2) It is often assumed that semantic search is in some sense different from surface text search: which implies that normal old-fashioned Google search (for example) is equivalent to randon string search, when of course the underlying statistics depend critically on the fact that both the queries and copora are natural language (English or German) words with underlying semantics.
3) Semantic Search depends critically on text annotation processes during indexing: but these are potentially corruptable by malefactors. How can this be prevented?

The seminar will explore these three issues, and attempt to find a better definition of the term semantic search and to identify soem ways forward.

The digital preservation problem is well-understood for query-centric information scenarios but has been less explored for scenarios where the important digital information to be preserved is the execution context within which data is processed, analysed, transformed and rendered. Furthermore, preservation is often considered as a set of activities carried out in the isolation of a single domain, without considering the dependencies on third-party services, information and capabilities that will be necessary to validate digital information in a futureusage context.
TIMBUS will endeavour to enlarge the understanding of DP to include the set of activities, processes and tools that ensure continued access to services and software necessary to produce the context within which information can be accessed, properly rendered, validated and transformed into knowledge. One of the fundamental requirements is to preserve the functional and non-functional specifications of services and software, along with their dependencies.

Partners
SAP AG
SBA Research
SQS Software Quality systems AG
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
INESC ID – Instituto de engenharia de sistemas e computadores, investigacao e desenvolvimento em Lisboa
iPharro Media GmbH
Intel Performance learning solutions limited
Caixa Magica Software lda
Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Laboratorio de Instrumentacao e Fisica Experimental de Particulas
Digital Preservation Coalition limited by guarantee*DPC

SBA is via AARIT part of the ABCDE project and will accept follows that want to join the research center.

Initiated in 1992 and open to PhD holders from Europe and all over the world, the Alain Bensoussan Fellowship Programme (ABFP) is designed for ICT students, researchers and professionals. Funded entirely by ERCIM members, the ABFP yields about 20 fellows per year on average.
Focusing on inter-sectoral ICT research and lasting generally 18 months, the fellowships are composed of two 9-month periods (9+9) to be spent in two different ERCIM institutes (located in two European countries) to foster trans-national mobility. Fellowships of 12 months hosted by one single ERCIM institution are also considered. In such cases, short research visits to other institutes are required in order to meet the training and mobility objectives of the programme.
Throughout the programme, the fellows are supported by the ERCIM Human Resource Task Force in driving their personal development scheme and to assist them in their future career plans, whether in European research institutions or in European Industry.
We believe ABCDE will provide a real opportunity to further develop and improve the already robust and self-sustainable Alain Bensoussan Fellowship Programme. Moreover, given the strategic nature of this training scheme focusing on ICT and novel technologies, COFUND support in up-scaling this Fellowship Programme would also enhance its impact over European research and competitiveness at large.

We kindly ask you to participate in our information security knowledge management survey. The survey is conducted by publicly-funded research institutions SBA Research (AT), Newcastle University (UK), and Vienna University of Technology (AT). We conduct the survey to explore potential ways of enabling companies and professionals to share information security knowledge through the application of collaborative semantic web technologies. The aggregated survey results will be published within publically-accessible research publications.

Survey: http://www.sba-research.org/survey/index.php?sid=73314

Thank you for your support.