Abstract: Within 10 years people will have hundreds of interconnected computing devices around them. Many connections will be wireless and many devices will store data in them. With a billion or more mobile users having a hundred devices we face a ubiquitous (IP) network with a very large (100B) small and hidden or embedded databases as well as 'always-on' connection to all kind of databases in the network. How to solve e.g. the challenges of security, replication and resilience. Some of the answers are visible already in today's mobile telephone and Internet networks. But many answers and even possible problems are not known yet. One of them is how fast will this technology take off, that is what might be the technology evolution we are facing.
About the speaker: Dr. Egbert-Jan Sol (1956, Dutch) is vice president Technology of Ericsson-Netherlands and currently on assignment in Sweden as director at LM Ericsson, Corporate Technology where he is involved in the "All-IP" evolution of fixed and mobile communication networks. He has an industrial career starting as system architect, project manager, software development manager, marketing manager and manager of a 500 person R&D center. Egbert-Jan Sol has been part-time professor at Technology Management at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and is a regular speaker on new technologies, in particular on the longer term evolution of the Internet.

Abstract: Three decades past, the relational empire conquered the hierarchical hegemony. Today, an upstart challenges the relational empire's dominance, threatening the return of hierarchy. XML is Lisp's bastard nephew, with uglier syntax and no semantics. Yet XML is poised to enable the creation of a Web of data that dwarfs anything since the Library at Alexandria. This talk examines the design of XQuery, the W3C standard query language for XML, and looks at related phenomena such as XML Schema and the Semantic Web.
About the speaker: Philip Wadler is a researcher at Avaya Labs. He likes to introduce theory into practice, and practice into theory. An example of the former is GJ, the basis for Sun's new version of Java with generics, which derives from quantifiers in second-order logic. An example of the latter is Featherweight Java, a simplification of Java comparable to lambda calculus. Phil currently edits two W3C documents, XML Query Formalism and XML Schema Formalism, two efforts to shine the light of mathematics onto the murk of industrial standards. In previous incarnations, Phil worked or studied at Bell Labs, Glasgow, Oxford, CMU, Xerox Parc, and Stanford, and served stints as guest professor at the universities of Sydney and Copenhagen. He edits the Journal of Functional Programming for Cambridge University Press, and has delivered invited talks in Amsterdam, Austin, Boulder, Brest, Gdansk, London, Montreal, New Delhi, New Haven, Portland, Santa Fe, Sydney, Victoria, and Washington.

Abstract: The European Commission opens in its 7th IST call for proposals, an action line for Semantic Web Technologies. It builds on ideas that have been looming for many years but have received their greatest push when the World Wide Web Consortium set up an interest group on that theme. The Semantic Web aims to make content machine understandable in order to automate a wide range of new tasks within the context of heterogeneous and distributed systems. The action line centres on four aspects: formalisation of the semantics, derivation of attributes, intelligent filtering and information visualisation. The Web is currently a mighty collection of flashy data but difficult to exploit. Adding semantics to content and ensuring their interoperability will turn it into an efficient knowledge source.
About the speaker: With a background in business computer science, Pierre-Paul Sondag held first several positions in that field in private manufacturing and service industries. He joined the European Commission in Luxembourg in 1989 and became Project Officer in 1993, organising calls for proposals and monitoring projects in the field of Language Engineering. He joined in 1999 a newly created Unit handling the key area of "Information access filtering analysis and handling" of the Information Society Technologies (IST) thematic programme. Within the European Commission, he is working with projects that aim to overcome the information overflow and ease non-experts to access, select and manipulate multimedia information from an ever-increasing range of heterogeneous sources. He has a particular interest for the evolution of the Web into a global knowledge space.

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of work in developing middleware for integrating and automating enterprise business processes. Today, with the growth in e-commerce and the blurring of enterprise boundaries, there is renewed interest in business process coordination, especially for inter-organizational processes. This paper provides a historical perspective on technologies for intra- and inter-enterprise business processes, reviews the state of the art, and exposes some open research issues. We include a discussion of process-based coordination and event/rule-based coordination, and corresponding products and standards activities. We provide an overview of the rather extensive work that has been done on advanced transaction models for business processes, and of the fledgling area of business process intelligence.