This collection consists of extended versions of selected papers from 2006 conferences and workshops on the semantics of data. It provides an opportunity for improved and more detailed versions of the best papers to be published, and ensures quality by subjecting the extended versions to the traditional scholarly review process required for journal publication. The workshops and conferences from which the selections are drawn are relatively specialized; therefore, wider dissemination of the most interesting results presented is a useful service to the data semantics research community.
The eight papers in this volume fall into four broad categories, with, of course, some overlap, especially given the fundamental role of ontologies in this field. The first category is software engineering and semantics, the subject of the first two papers. The first of these, by Brambilla et al., deals with the application of software engineering methods to design for semantic Web systems; it presents the authors’ approach to the 2006 Semantic Web Service Challenge. The second paper, by Roser and Bauer, concerns model-driven architectures--specifically, their transformation using ontologies.
Integration and matching--schema integration, data integration, and ontology matching--are addressed in three papers. Mork et al. describe a framework for integrating different schema matching tools and related implementation experiences. Piprani’s paper concerns data and model integration in data warehousing applications using object-role modeling. Sabou et al. discuss a paradigm for ontology matching using existing online ontologies and related experiments.
Knowledge and ontology acquisition and learning is the focus of two papers. In one, Brunzel and Spiliopoulou discuss extraction of semantics from Web documents; in the other, Herschel et al. infer semantics from the analysis of user opinions and tagging. Finally, the paper by George and Shekhar deals with applied models; it describes a model of spatio-temporal networks, such as street traffic.
