We are back and looking forward to meeting you all.

A quick overview on Semantic Web Services. What are Semantic Web
Services?

Semantic Web services (SWS) aims at extending traditional Web services
with machine-readable semantic descriptions of their functionality and
interfaces in order to increase the degree of automation for
service-based applications, e.g., by allowing the discovery, binding
and composition of services to be performed automatically.

This talk will provide a quick introduction to Semantic Web Services,
will discuss what have been the past achievements in this research area. The talk will also try to
analyze what are the problems that are hindering semantic web services to be largely adopted and how
future work in the area can contribute to solve such issue.

Speakers:

Federico Michele Facca is a senior researcher and unit leader at STI
Innsbruck. He obtained his Ph.D. in Information Technology and his
M.Sc in Computer Science and Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano.
He has been involved in several research projects over the last couple
of years: COIN, MAIS, SemanticGov, SHAPE and SUPER. He is responsible
for Web Service eXecution Environment (WSMX) and member of the OASIS
Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee (SEE TC). He has
published several articles in international journals and conferences.
His research papers have been awarded in ICWE and ISWC. His research
interests cover
Semantically-enabled Service Oriented Architecture, Semantic Web
Engineering, Semantic Web.

Reto Krummenacher holds a degree in communication system engineering
from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. Since
late 2004 he is, as researcher and PhD student, member of the Semantic
Technology Institute at the University of Innsbruck with a strong focus
on Semantic Space middleware in ubiquitous and large scale computing
environments such as the Service Web. In addition to his work as
researcher in different European projects (e.g., TripCom, SOA4All), he
has been organizing several events on semantic extensions to middleware:
MSW@ICSC, SEMELS@OTM or CoMA@WETICE.

Street parking is available. Keep in mind, it is metered until 8:00 PM. If you don't feel like driving, you may take BART - it is only 3 blocks away. Map it!

- Shamod