Message from The First International Workshop on Semantics Enabled Networks and Services (SeNS 2006) Organizers
Lakshmish Macheeri Ramaswamy, Amit Sheth, Program Co-Chairs · 2006
On behalf of the Program Committee, we would like to welcome you to the First International Workshop on Semantics Enabled Networks and Services (SeNS 2006). The field of distributed systems is increasingly becoming service oriented and information/knowledge centric. In this context the role of application and data semantics in designing large-scale distributed systems is gaining critical importance. At the same time, applications are becoming more demanding and networks are becoming increasingly capable of supporting additional features. This has led to considerable excitement and activity in the industry in utilizing semantics and associated data engineering techniques at network and middleware component levels for enhancing their performances and capabilities. However, academic research and discussions in this crucial area have been very limited until now. The primary objective of this workshop is to start exploring novel and interesting research issues related to understanding, supporting, and managing semantics in distributed computing, services, Grid, and network components, and utilizing the data and application semantics to enhance the scalability, performance, and security of large-scale distributed systems and services. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from key areas of networking/middleware, distributed systems/services, and data and information semantics, and initiate discussions in this area. Since some of the early breakthroughs in this research field have come from the industry (such as application oriented networks from CISCO Inc. and XML-aware networking from DataPower Inc.), we believe that it is important to promote discussions among academicians, researchers, and industry professionals. Accordingly, we have endeavored to ensure healthy industry participation in organizing and conducting this workshop. The workshop program includes a keynote address, a set of six research papers, and a panel discussion. The research papers study various issues and applications of utilizing semantics to enhance the capabilities of networks and middleware. An exciting panel of experts from industry and academia will explore the future challenges and opportunities in the area. We would like to thank the Program Committee members for helping us in evolving this workshop program. We hope that the deliberations on Semantics Enabled Networking and Services will lead to evolution of a next generation of system architectures that exploit semantics to support even more demanding and scalable Internet-based applications.