WWW2005 Panel: "Querying the Past, Present, and Future: Where the Web is and where the future Web will be"

Dr. Andrei Z. Broder (IBM T. J. Watson Research, USA	Panelist
Dr. Dieter Fensel, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Europe	Panelist
Dr. Carole Goble, University of Manchester, United Kingdom	Panelist
Dr. Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA	Panel Moderator
Dr. Christopher Olston, CMU, USA	Panelist
Dr. Calton Pu, CERCS, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA	Panelist

Conference Site: http://www2005.org/

Panel Title: "Querying the Past, Present, and Future: Where the Web is and where the future Web will be"

Panel objective, scope and target audience:

World Web Web today, represented by HTML (XML) over HTTP and powered by Web server, application server technology and Web services, is the lingua franca of the bulk of contents out on the Internet. The focus of the Web technology today is on searching the current state of data and sharing data upon request. This panel argues that this focus cannot meet all the current and emerging business needs for at least two reasons. On one hand, today’s businesses need access not only to the present state of data but also to the complete past history of data (we need to know what was known and what happened and when) and the future trend of data (we need to know about the updated information when the amount of updates to the present data reaches certain threshold). Frequently cited examples include ePC/RFID (electronic Product Code/Radio Frequency Identifier), RTE (Real Time Enterprise), and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). On the other hand, as computing and communication options become more ubiquitous, this Web access capability is being embedded in billions of wireless devices such as cellphones, PDAs, and computers embedded in vehicles. End-users want to view and use the Web from their mobile devices just as quickly and easily as they use the Web from their PC. Businesses need continuous availability and location awareness to the Web content delivery and dissemination to increase their capability to stay competitive. The Mobile Web is on a trajectory to extend the Web through offering all of the features and value propositions as the present wired Web, with the promise of greater and richer information access opportunity and device-spanning Web experiences.

This panel will focus on exploring future enhancements of Web technology for active and continuous Web information delivery and dissemination. The panel discussion will be centered on the following three key issues with respect to querying the past, present, and future and how the Web will evolve:

1. Do we want the Web become event-driven? What do we need to make the present Web an active Web or an event Web that offers richer experiences and greater information access opportunities to present, past and future data?

2. Whether the current Web technology is sufficient for querying present, past and future? What can be leveraged in this endeavor?
3. Do we need any new standards/techniques to leverage effects of such evolution or revolution?

We will organize the panel discussion to debat on these questions from three dimensions: Theory, Technology, and Practice. The panlists will present their viewpoints and arguments based on their expertises and R&D experiences from Search Engine and Web Information Retrieval, Semantic Web and Data Grid, Event Web and Information monitoring, Web data management and visualization, and distributed information flow management. The main goal of this panel is two folds: (1) we want to show how a combination of ideas from a variety of existing disciplines can help in meeting the new challenges of future Web information delivery and dissemination; and (2) we also want to exploit ideas and suggestions that may be in conflict with current, well-accepted approaches.

Intended Audience

The panel should have a great appeal to the following groups of audiences:

Researchers: This panel will generate a collection of interesting problems and challenges for researchers to work on. This appeal is strengthened by inviting top researchers active in various Web related research areas into the panel. We also expect the panel to debate on which problems or technical challenges are the most critical ones for enabling querying the past, present, future. Researchers can contribute to the panel by sharing their arguments or disagreements on what consistitutes the most important problems in enabling querying the present, past, and future.

Developers: This panel will expose developers to the cutting ege technology and the future Web, how these technologies may help maximize business objectives and what it takes to make it a reality. Developers can contribute to the panel by sharing with the panel attendees their current development experience and their arguments on what could be possible or what is impossible using existing technology.

Users: This panel will present many intriging ideas and arguments about how the Web will evolve from business perspective, from everyday user perspective, and what we wish the Web to be, focuing on quering present, past and future. Users can contribute to the panel by sharing their arguments or disagreements based on their experience as everyday users on the panel theme.

The successful panel session will not only draw an audience, but will also engage and stimulate discussions and audience participation. This is ensured by having panlists from wide range of fields, good quality of arguments, and balancing of the three categories of questions in the structure of the panel.

Panel Format

The panel Length will be 90 minutes. The panel will start by showing some interesting application scenarios and asking three key questions to focus the discussion. The first question is “Can the Web be used to query the present, past and future?”. For those panelists who are the advocate of the active Web or event Web, the second and third questions are “How can existing Web technology help?” and “What new technology do we need to succeed?”. For those panelists who act as the opponents of querying past and future, the second and third questions could be “Why is the Web not a good forum for querying present as well as past and future?” and “What would be a good technological platform for querying past, present, and future?”. The organization also balances formal with ad hoc discussions and encourages and synthesizes new thoughts.

Panel [90 mins]

· Introduction [Moderator, 5 min]

Scope of panel, key questions to be asked, who are panelists, what are their qualifications, what view points do the panelists represent

· State Opinion [Panelists, 10 min each]

Each of the panelists prepares 3-5 slides to state their opinion.

· Discussion [All, 40-45 min]

• We will moderate the discussion focusing on the three key questions . Each will be discussed for about 10-15 minutes

• Wrap Up [2-5 minutes]

The names and affiliations of Panelists:

• Panelist: Dr. Andrei Z. Broder (IBM T. J. Watson Research, USA
  Dr. Andrei Broder is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research.  From 1999 until 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company.  Previously he has been a senior member of the research staff at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto.  He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University. His main research interests are the design, analysis, and implementation of randomized algorithms and supporting data structures, in particular in the context of web-scale information retrieval and applications. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his work on duplicate elimination of web pages) and at WWW9 (for his work on mapping the web).  He has published more than seventy papers and was awarded seventeen patents.  He serves as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.
• Panelist: Dr. Dieter Fensel, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Europe
  Dr. Dieter Fensel obtained in 1989 a Diploma in Social Science at the Free University of Berlin and a Diploma in Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1993 he was awarded a Doctor’s degree in economic science (Dr. rer. pol.) at the University of Karlsruhe and in 1998 he received his Habilitation in Applied Computer Science. He was working at the University of Karlsruhe (AIFB), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). In 2002, he took a chair at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2003 he becomes the scientific director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, based on a large grant acquired from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). His current research interests include Ontologies, semantic web, web services, knowledge management, enterprise application integration, and electronic commerce. He published around 150 papers as books and journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. He co-organised around 150 scientific workshops and conferences and has edited several special issues of scientific journals. He is associated editor of several international journals (e.g., KAIS, ETAI, WIAS). He has been involved in several national and internal research projects, including the IST projects dip, IBROW, Knowledge Web, Ontoknowledge, Ontoweb, SWWS, and Wonderweb and has been the project coordinator of dip, Knowledge Web, Ontoknowledge, Ontoweb, and SWWS. Dieter Fensel is the co-author of several books. The most recent one is Spinning the Semantic Web, MIT Press, Boston, 2003.
• Panelist: Dr. Carole Goble (University of Manchester, UK)
  Professor Carole Goble’s research interests are centered on the accessibility of information, primarily through the use of ontologies for the representation and classification of metadata. She works in many application areas, particularly Life Sciences. The Information Management Group that she co-leads is renowned for its work on ontology languages, reasoning systems and their practical application to real problems. Her work on the application of ontologies to bioinformatics has been especially influential. She currently has a leading role in two major international initiatives: the Semantic Web and e-Science/Grid. She pioneered work in semantic web-based hypermedia and semantic browsing in the COHSE project. She is currently a Research Area co-director of the EU NoE KnowledgeWeb, and sits on the International Semantic Web Science Association board. She is an Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics and is a founder of a spin-out company, Network Inference, specialising in technologies for the Semantic Web. She is heavily also involved in the UK e-Science Grid initiative and is director of one of the largest UK e-Science pilots, ^myGrid, as well as directing a UK eScience Centre. ^myGrid applies Semantic Web technologies to Grid services based on Web Services -- the so called Semantic Grid. Carole is the co-chair of the Semantic Grid Research Group in the Global Grid Forum and is the Technical Director of the EU FP6 STREP OntoGrid, which aims to develop an architecture for the Semantic Grid. Carole chaired the first Semantic Web track of the World Wide Web Conference in 2002 and is the PC chair for WWW2006.
• Panel Moderator: Dr. Ling Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
  Dr. Ling Liu is an associate professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. There, she directs the research program in Distributed Data Intensive Systems program working on various aspects of distributed data intensive systems, ranging from Web information monitoring, decentralized networked computing, mobile computing and ubiquitous information access, and enterprise computing. Dr. Liu has published around 150 papers as journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. Her research group has produced a number of open source software systems, among which the most popular ones are WebCQ and XWRAPElite. She and her students have received a best paper award from IEEE ICDCS 2003 for their work on PeerCQ and a best paper award from International Conference of World Wide Web (2004) for their work on Caching Dynamic Web Content, a joint project with IBM T.J. Watson. Dr. Liu servers on the editorial board of several international journals (e.g., TKDE, VLDBJ, JWSR), and co-chaired the technical program of several International Conferences (including ICDE 2006, CollaborateCom2005, ICWS 2004, ODBASE 2002, CIKM 2001). Most of her current research projects are partially sponsored by NSF, DoE, DARPA, IBM, and HP.
• Panelist: Dr. Christopher Olston (CMU, USA)
  Dr. Christopher Olston is an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include data stream management and Web search. Recently he has studied techniques for capturing information from time-varying Web pages, with applications in search, synthesis, and archival of Web content. Olston received his Ph.D. in 2003 from Stanford University, where he was supported by dual fellowship awards from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Graduate Fellowship program. Prior to attending graduate school, he received the 1998 Computing Research Association Award for Outstanding Undergraduates.
• Panelist: Dr. Calton Pu (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
  Dr. Calton Pu is a John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair Professor at the College of Computing, Georgia Tech and a co-director of the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS). Calton's research interests are in the areas of distributed computing, Internet data management, and operating systems. In distributed systems, his focus is on extended transaction processing, system survivability, and Internet applications. In operating systems, he is applying the idea of specialization . Comparing with usual centralized systems, distributed and parallel systems softwares display unique characteristics in distance, complexity, extensibility, concurrency and availability. Making software handle these problems in a reliable and efficient way is the emphasis of Calton Pu's work. In the Infosphere project, he is developing concepts and software for Internet-scale applications driven by information flow such as real-time decision support, digital libraries, and electronic commerce. The sponsors for Calton Pu's research include both government funding agencies such as DARPA, NSF, and companies from industry such as IBM, Intel, and HP.  He is an affiliated faculty of Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS), Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), and Tannenbaum Institute.