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Workshop Report
Applications of Logic Programming to the Web, Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (ALPSWS'07)
PDF Version available HERE. Workshop Web Page: http://www.bd.cesma.usb.ve/alpsws07/ The second international workshop on Applications of Logic Programming to the Web, Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (ALPSWS2007) was held on September 13th, 2007 in Porto, Portugal as part of the 23rd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP07). This year's workshop was focused around Query Languages on the Web, Integrating Ontologies and Rules, and more general application frameworks for Logic Programming on the Semantic Web. Besides the presented papers, an invited talk by Dr. Enrico Pontelli on "ASP-Prolog as a framework for Rule-base and Knowledge-base Integration" emphasized the significance of LP-based approaches for knowledge integration, one of the key problems for both aggregating Web data on the one hand and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) on the other hand. A concluding discussion focused on the overall suitability of Logic Programming for Web applications. The overall goal of this second edition of ALPSWS was - similarly to last year's workshop (also co-located with ICLP) - to get a snapshot of the state of the art related to applications of LP to the Web, Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services with the following main objectives:
Overall, seven papers were accepted for presentations, which can also be found in the online proceedings.1 In general, this workshop was more on the application side than last year's edition. Finally, a closing discussion on issues related to the workshop main field discussed the future of LP as a paradigm for Web applications. Short overview of presented contributionsThe three papers in the first block presented three very different ontology query engines. The first one described dlvhex-SPARQL, a SPARQL plugin that uses dlvhex, a flexible plugin system on top of the DLV ASP solver. The second paper presented the OneQL system, a query engine that implements a twofold optimization strategy combining cost-based optimization and Magic Sets techniques for queries to ontologies represented as deductive databases. This work was an extension of work presented in last year's workshop aready. The third and last paper in this session presented a system that uses Contextual Logic Programming as a computational hub for knowledge modeled by web ontologies and enables querying that representation.The second block presented several systems integrating ontologies and rules. The first paper presents the SINTAGMA system which supports the semantic integration of heterogeneous information sources using a meta data driven approach. The second paper described a combination of the Web ontology Language (OWL) with F-Logic and an architecture for Semantic Web application nodes. The implementation combines a Jena-based architecture with an external Florid instance. The third paper in this session presented a prototype system, HD-rules, that integrates normal clauses under the well-founded semantics with ontologies specified in Description Logics. The afternoon session consisted of a very interesting presentation of a real-life Web application developed wholly in SWI-Prolog together wih its Semantic Web Library. The application is a demonstrator that provides access to multiple art collections and links these using cultural heritage vocabularies. Concluding the programme, Enrico Pontelli's invited talk presented a logic programming framework that addressed the problems of integration of components and inter-operation of knowledge bases that use different RuleML languages. The approach relies on the combination of the ASP-Prolog framework with modular Answer-Set Programming. Concluding DiscussionSixteen participants joined the workshop, some of them not workshop authors. Following the paper presentations and the invited talk, the closing discussion revolved around the suitability of LP for the Web. The suitability of LP was compared against the suitability of Description Logics (DL); issues around expressiveness (modeling capability) and complexity of LP languages compared with DL languages arised. One conclusion to be drawn could be the need for further proofs of concept of the different paradigms used and usable for real Web applications, where specially the last two presentations of the workshop can be named as encouraging starting points.Finally, we would like to mention that from last year's workshop a joint project between researchers in the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid was initiated. This project is being funded by the AECI (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional) - a Spanish governmental agency that supports collaborations between Latin-American and Spanish institutions. Proceedings including the full papers and an abstract of the invited talk are available online in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series, under Vol-287 (see http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-287/). 1http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-287/ |
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