Letizia Tanca – författare

Databases have been designed to store large volumes of data and to provide efficient query interfaces. Semantic Web formats are geared towards capturing domain knowledge, interlinking annotations, and offering a high-level, machine-processable view of information. However, the gigantic amount of such useful information makes efficient management of it increasingly difficult, undermining the possibility of transforming it into useful knowledge.

The research presented by De Virgilio, Giunchiglia and Tanca tries to bridge the two worlds in order to leverage the efficiency and scalability of database-oriented technologies to support an ontological high-level view of data and metadata. The contributions present and analyze techniques for semantic information management, by taking advantage of the synergies between the logical basis of the Semantic Web and the logical foundations of data management. The book’s leitmotif is to propose models and methods especially tailored to represent and manage data that is appropriately structured for easier machine processing on the Web.

After two introductory chapters on data management and the Semantic Web in general, the remaining contributions are grouped into five parts on Semantic Web Data Storage, Reasoning in the Semantic Web, Semantic Web Data Querying, Semantic Web Applications, and Engineering Semantic Web Systems. The handbook-like presentation makes this volume an important reference on current work and a source of inspiration for future development, targeting academic and industrial researchers as well as graduate students in Semantic Web technologies or database design.

The need for flexibility and globalization forces enterprises to decentralize their activities and continuously (re)structure their networks of relationships regarding both their productive "supply chains" and their design and innovation processes. The goal of the ArtDeco project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research under the FIRB program (funding for basic research), has been to address these issues by proposing solutions from three main perspectives: the organizational perspective aimed at studying how companies work in a network and how their design processes can benefit from collaboration with other companies; the informational perspective focusing on how to acquire relevant knowledge from unstructured information and processes and on how to organize and manage such knowledge; and the infrastructural perspective focusing on understanding how self-adaptive workflows and software systems can help in supporting the dynamic interconnection of enterprises.

The book contains a collection of papers offering an overview of the main results produced by the ArtDeco project. It has been structured into the following four main parts: organizational issues: methodologies, empirical contexts and policies; software methodologies and technologies; knowledge elicitation and management; and management of peripheral devices. It also includes a case study used throughout the book as a reference example.