Bücher von Steffen Staab

Just like the industrial society of the last century depended on natural resources, today's society depends on information and its exchange. Semantic Web technologies address the problem of information complexity by providing advanced support for representing and processing distributed information, while peer-to-peer technologies address issues of system complexity by allowing flexible and decentralized information storage and processing. Systems that are based on Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies promise to combine the advantages of the two mechanisms. A peer-to-peer style architecture for the Semantic Web will avoid both physical and semantic bottlenecks that limit information and knowledge exchange.Staab and Stuckenschmidt structured the selected contributions into four parts: Part I, "e;Data Storage and Access"e;, prepares the semantic foundation, i.e. data modelling and querying in a flexible and yet scalable manner. These foundations allow for dealing with the organization of information at the individual peers. Part II, "e;Querying the Network"e;, considers the routing of queries, as well as continuous queries and personalized queries under the conditions of the permanently changing topological structure of a peer-to-peer network. Part III, "e;Semantic Integration"e;, deals with the mapping of heterogeneous data representations. Finally Part IV, "e;Methodology and Systems"e;, reports experiences from case studies and sample applications.The overall result is a state-of-the-art description of the potential of Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies for information sharing and knowledge management when applied jointly. It serves researchers in academia and industry as an excellent and lasting reference and source of inspiration.

th The 15 International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (2006), held on October 6-10, 2006 in Pod? ebrady,Czech Republic, followed a long tradition of European Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (from 1987),whicheventuallyacquiredtheformatofconference(in2000)whilekeeping their open-minded and interactive spirit. During the nearly 20 year lifespan of the series, the discipline of knowledge engineering (KE) evolved greatly. While knowledge acquisition (KA) techniques dominated in the very ?rst years, formal approaches to knowledge-based inf- ence and variousnew streamssuch as knowledgediscoveryfrom data/textslater cameinto play. During thelate1990sandafterwards,EKAWbecamea founding community for ontology and Semantic Web Research, which was also re?ected in the sub-titles of the 2002 and 2004 editions: "e;Ontologies and the Semantic Web"e; and "e;Engineering Knowledge in the Age of the Semantic Web,"e; resp- tively. The 2006 edition, in turn, only slightly refocussed this trend. Its sub-title is "e;Managing Knowledge in a World of Networks,"e; which re?ects the fact that semantics typically arises not only as a result of explicit engineering activities (as in Semantic Web) but also emerges from interaction of a high number of interconnected documents, ontological concepts, software applications and - especially - human users. The importance given to the interconnection of - man users in a sense loops back to the knowledge acquisition roots of EKAW and its 'holistic' view of knowledge engineering.