Julia Stoyanovich is going to visit Webdam on December

November 8th, 2011
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Webdam look forward to welcoming Julia Stoyanovich from December 2nd to 9th.

Julia Stoyanovich is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Pensylvania, where she works with Professor Susan Davidson and her group’s research.

Julia Stoyanovich is motivated by the data management needs of life sciences applications and of social information processing. She is working on incorporating semantic context into search, ranking, and data exploration in large complex datasets. She is also interested in managing provenance in scientific workflows, and in the related privacy and security considerations.

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Gerome Miklau is going to visit Webdam on December

November 3rd, 2011
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Webdam look forward to welcoming Gerome Miklau from December 1st to 7th.

Gerome Miklau is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor Miklau’s research interests are in the area of Database research with an emphasis on security; database theory; semi-structured data. The objective of his research is to enable secure and trustworthy data management in both conventional database systems and distributed environments like the World Wide Web. His work focuses on classical security concerns such as confidentiality, privacy, and integrity of data.

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PARIS: Probabilistic Alignment of Relations, Instances, and Schema (website)

November 2nd, 2011
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A website for PARIS

One of the main challenges that the Semantic Web faces is the integration of a growing number of independently designed ontologies. In this work, we present paris, an approach for the automatic alignment of ontologies. paris aligns not only instances, but also relations and classes. Alignments at the instance level cross-fertilize with alignments at the schema level. Thereby, our system provides a truly holistic solution to the problem of ontology alignment. The heart of the approach is probabilistic, i.e., we measure degrees of matchings based on probability estimates. This allows paris to run without any parameter tuning. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm and its precision through extensive experiments. In particular, we obtain a precision of around 90 % in experiments with some of the world’s largest ontologies.

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Collège de France designated Serge Abiteboul to the Annual Chair in Information Technology and Digital Sciences for 2011-2012

October 4th, 2011
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The inaugural lecture will take place at amphitheatre Halbwachs at Collège de France, Thursday March 8th 2012 at 18h.

The lectures will start next Wednesday from 10 to 11 AM followed by a seminar given by illustrious guests. You can find the calendar with more details about the guests and the date either :

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The “Web Data Management and Distribution” book released

September 20th, 2011
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The “Web Data Management and Distribution” book by Serge Abiteboul, Ioana Manolescu, Philippe Rigaux, Marie-Christine & Pierre Senellart (nicknamed Jorge) is officially launched on the Web: http://webdam.inria.fr/Jorge/

It comes in full in PDF with slides and programming projects.

The book is available at Cambridge University Press

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PhD defense of Alban Galland

September 19th, 2011
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Alban Galland will defend his PhD, September 28th 2011 at 15:00, room 455 of PCRI at Gif-sur-Yvette (Plateau de Saclay)

Title: Distributed Data Management with Access Control
– Social Networks and Data of the Web

Abstract: The amount of information on the Web is spreading very rapidly. Users as
well as companies bring data to the network and are willing to share with
others. They quickly reach a situation where their information is hosted on
many machines they own and on a large number of autonomous systems
where they have accounts. Management of all this information is rapidly
becoming beyond human expertise. We introduce WebdamExchange, a
novel distributed knowledge-base model that includes logical statements
for specifying information, access control, secrets, distribution, and knowl-
edge about other peers. These statements can be communicated, replicated,
queried, and updated, while keeping track of time and provenance. The
resulting knowledge guides distributed data management. WebdamEx-
change model is based on WebdamLog, a new rule-based language for
distributed data management that combines in a formal setting deductive
rules as in Datalog with negation, (to specify intensional data) and active
rules as in Datalog¬¬ (for updates and communications). The model pro-
vides a novel setting with a strong emphasis on dynamicity and interactions
(in a Web 2.0 style). Because the model is powerful, it provides a clean
basis for the specification of complex distributed applications. Because it
is simple, it provides a formal framework for studying many facets of the
problem such as distribution, concurrency, and expressivity in the context
of distributed autonomous peers. We also discuss an implementation of a
proof-of-concept system that handles all the components of the knowledge
base and experiments with a lighter system designed for smartphones. We
believe that these contributions are a good foundation to overcome the
problems of Web data management, in particular with respect to access
control.

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Marie-Christine Rousset on french web-radio about “Genèse d’un algorithme”

May 6th, 2011
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Marie-Christine Rousset with Gilles Dowek and François Rechenmann participate in Xavier de La Porte podcast about Genèse d’un algorithme related to the paper on interstices.info also in french.

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Webdam meeting

March 14th, 2011
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Daniel and Yael joining Webdam

January 21st, 2011
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Webdam is very happy to announce that Daniel Deutch and Yael Amsterdamer are joining the project beginning of February.

Daniel did his PhD with Tova Milo at Tel Aviv U., then a postdoc at the Computer & Information Science Department
in the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Yael is starting a PhD also with Tova Milo.

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Pierre defends his PhD

January 4th, 2011
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Pierre Bourhis will defend his PhD, February 11th 2011, in room N107 of Parc-Club of Orsay.

Title: On the dynamics of active documents for distributed data management

Abstract: One of the major issues faced by Web applications is the management of evolving of data. In this thesis, we consider this problem and in particular the evolution of active documents. Active documents is a formalism describing the evolution of XML documents by activating Web services calls included in the document. It has already been used in the context of the management of distributed data axml.
The main contributions of this thesis are theoretical studies motivated by two systems for managing respectively stream applications and workflow applications. In a first contribution, we study the problem of view maintenance over active documents. The results served as the basis for an implementation of stream processors based on active documents called Axlog widgets. In a second one, we see active documents as the core of data centric workflows and consider various ways of expressing constraints on the evolution of documents. The implementation, called Axart, validated the approach of a data centric workflow system based on active documents.

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