Holger Lausen

Research

My current research interest are in the areas of Semantic Web Services and Search Engines.

Research Projects:

• SOA4all (2008-2010)
  Computer science is entering a new generation. The emerging generation starts by abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in a SOA. In a world of services, it is the service that counts for a customer and not the software or hardware components which implement the service. Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing by abstracting from the underlying hardware and software layers, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges that SOA does not address today. SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology. SOA4ALL will provide a framework and infrastructure that integrates technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform.
• Service-Finder (2008-2009)
  Today the Web is moving from a collection of static documents to a set of Web Services. In parallel, the role of Web users is also changing, with a shift from a passive, consuming role to an active one where users dynamically contribute to the creation of new contents (Web 2.0). Web Services and Web 2.0 are already being used to develop Web-based applications. However, up to now applications that use Web Services do not use the Web 2.0 approach. The European research project Service-Finder aims at developing a platform for service discovery in which Web Services are embedded in a Web 2.0 environment, thus hiding the technological complexity from the user. In particular, the objective of this project is to aggregate information coming from heterogeneous sources automatically.
• Reasoning with Web Services - RW² (2005-2007)
  Semantic Web technologies are being applied to Web Services with the aim of offering a higher support for the automation of a number of tasks, significantly improving the quality of the integration tasks while drastically reducing its cost. The RW² project follows the direction of research that describes Web Services based up on a comprehensive Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO), which has recently emerged as major initiative in the area. The basic framework is given, however to exploit the descriptions, to automatically locate Web Services that fulfill the user needs, and how to support the user in defining such descriptions, has not been solved yet. Furthermore, a powerful and flexible inference engine to efficiently reason with the formal descriptions tailored to the needs of Semantic Web Services has not been developed so far. As a result, automation using Semantic Web Services for EAI has not been realized. We will provide the theoretical basis and prototypes for realizing the automation of the integration tasks, namely: reasoning procedures to exploit the Semantic descriptions of Web Services, a logical framework to formalize the dynamic location of services fulfilling a given goal, and a design studio that will exploit the reasoning procedures and the discovery framework to support the creation, verification and evaluation of the relevant descriptions.
• Semantic Web enabled Web Services (SWWS) (2003-2005)
  Web services promise a new level of service on top of current web. However, in order to employ their full potential, appropriate description means for web services need to be developed. Current technology around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP provide limited support in mechanizing service recognition, service configuration and combination, service comparison and automated negotiation. Therefore, the main objectives of SWWS are to provide a comprehensive Web Service description framework, to define a Web Service discovery framework, and to provide a scalable Web Service mediation.
  In order to evaluate the overall approach, SWWS will provide a Semantic Web based Web Service platform which will service as a basis for three case studies, one in the B2C area and two in the B2B area, that cover a wide range of potential further E-Business applications.

Workshops Organized:

• 2004: WSMO Implementation Workshop ( WIW )
  The objective of this workshop is to discuss different implementations related to WSMO, and to gain insight in problems related to implementing WSMO. Papers on related topics and prototypes have been presented.
• 2004: Workshop on Application of Semantic Web Technologies to Web Communities
  The workshop provided a forum for workers in the fields of knowledge engineering, knowledge management, knowledge representation, language technology, ontological engineering, data, text and web mining and Semantic Web, to present their latest results and to discuss the potential joint application of these fields to Web communities, both analysing what has been achieved so far and what are the next steps to accomplish.

Program Committees:

• Co Chair Program Committee Co-Chairs: Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006 Challenge on Automating Web Services Mediation, Choreography and Discovery: http://www.sws-challenge.org/
• Program Committee AST 2008 (Applications of Semantic Technologies) at Informatik 2008 WS
• Program Committee RuleML 2007, 2008 (The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications).
• Program Committee SMR² (Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web) At the 7th International Semantic Web Conference Karlsruhe, Germany

Invited Talks

• 2004: Describing and Discovering Web Services with WSMO, Ludwig Maximiliams Universität München, PMS Lehrstuhl.