Second International Workshop on Managing Context Information and Semantics in Mobile Environments (MCISME)

in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'07), Mannheim, Germany, May 7-11, 2007

News

Workshop program online.

General Information

Mobile ad-hoc networks, pervasive computing, and sensor networking are three prominent examples in which computation and communication intermingle with the real world. This changes the role of context information and semantics as compared to traditional information systems, as now the physical environment immediately affects and interacts with the processing of data and communication. Real-world context information can help to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways to provide data relevant to the user, to enable improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and to decide when and how to process data. So far, the contextual and semantic aspects of mobile environments have received insufficient attention from the research community as the specific intricacies and resource issues of mobile environments have not been considered and in mobile data management only limited attention has been paid to context and semantics. In this workshop we plan to address the interdisciplinary issues of the domain and bring together researchers from mobile data management, knowledge management/semantics, distributed systems, and software engineering to discuss the common interests, share and exchange expertise and results, appreciate each other's results and contributions. The long-term goal is to provide application developers with facilities (middleware, infrastructures, agent systems, etc.) that enable the development and deployment of context-aware applications in mobile and pervasive environments.

Workshop Activities and Goals

The increasing popularity of mobile devices, such as laptops, mobile phones, and personal digital assistants, advances in wireless networking technologies, the advent of sensor networks are enabling new classes of applications targeting environments characterized by being dynamic, mobile, reconfigurable, and personalized spontaneously. These applications and their targeted environments raise challenging problems for application developers, as they have to be aware of the variations in the execution context such as location, time, users' activities, and devices' capabilities in order to tune and adapt the behavior and functionalities of applications.

This also changes the role of context information and semantics as compared to traditional information systems, as now the physical environment immediately affects and interacts with the processing of data and communication. Real-world context information can help to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways to provide data relevant to the user, to enable improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and to decide when and how to process data. Unfortunately, current technologies do not fully support such flexible and self-adapting models based on context. For example, if a mobile user today wants to use the computing resources of a new environment, he/she has to obtain the necessary information, assess it (format, semantics) and figure out manually how to continue his/her activities with the local resources of that new environment. This is unacceptable in pervasive computing environment and neglects the advances which have been made in other research domains dealing with context information and semantics.

In this workshop we plan to address the interdisciplinary issues of the domain and bring together researchers from mobile data management, knowledge management/semantics, distributed systems, and software engineering to discuss the common interests, share and exchange expertise and results, appreciate each other's results and contributions, and to provide application developers with facilities (middleware, infrastructures, agent systems, etc.) that enable the development and deployment of context-aware applications in mobile and pervasive environments.

Topics

We encourage submissions in the areas of mobile networks, ad-hoc networks, sensor netorks, peer-to-peer systems (overlay networks), and semantic data management which specifically focus on mobility. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Acquiring and disseminating context information from physical and logical sensors
Semantic sensor networks
Exploiting new types of context information such as network context, social context, and system context, and enabling infrastructures to support management of context information and semantics in mobile environments
Community-based semantics in mobile environments
Semantic discovery and invocation based on context
Activity-based computing and its relation to context-aware mobile computing
Query planning, execution, and optimization in mobile environments
Context-aware mobile database transactions and query processing
Data placement and storage in mobile environments
Dynamic semantic integration and translation
Semantic self-organization, emergent semantics and learning
Data stream mining
Semantic data analysis for network traffic estimation/reduction and security
Semantic indexing, caching, and replication techniques for mobile environments
Context-adaptive applications and algorithms
Case studies

Committees

Program Chairs

Manfred Hauswirth, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway
Wathiq Mansoor, American University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Program Committee

Klemens Böhm, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Paul-Alexandru Chirita, L3S, Germany

Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, EPFL, Switzerland

Elmar Dorner, SAP, Germany

Abdelkader Hameurlain, University Paul Sabatier, France

Siegfried Handschuh, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway

Hagen Höpfner, International University, Germany

Vana Kalogeraki, University of CA, Riverside, USA

Birgitta König-Riess, University of Jena, Germany

Manolis Koubarakis, University of Athens, Greece

Pedro José Marrón, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Takahiro Hara, Osaka University, Japan

Aris M. Ouksel, University of Chicago, USA

Evaggelia Pitoura, University of Ioannina, Greece

Ivana Podnar Zarko, FER, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Axel Polleres, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain

Fabio Porto, EPFL, Switzerland

Gerald Reif, University of Zürich, Switzerland

Tore Risch, Uppsala University, Sweden

Thomas Risse, Fraunhofer IPSI, Germany

Kai-Uwe Sattler, TU Ilmenau, Germany

Marc Scholl, University of Konstanz, Germany

Wolf Siberski, L3S, Germany

Nenad Stojanovic, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz, Germany

Can Türker, ETHZ, Switzerland

Ouri E. Wolfson, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Andreas Wombacher, EPFL, Switzerland

Format of the Workshop

The workshop solicits scientific papers that address semantic problems specific to mobile environments. Additionally, position papers outlining interesting new research domains and approaches would be welcome. The selection of papers is based primarily on their potential to influence future research. This influence can be exercised in many ways, exemplified by but not limited to the following:

Articulating a new perspective on semantics and context information in mobile environments
Describing new problems regarding semantics and context information that arise from the specific domain of mobile environments and how to address them
Describing a novel approach to an existing problem that promises to influence future research specifically in respect to mobility
Describing a new problem that requires our attention
Debunking an old perspective about semantics, context information, and mobility

Program

Time	Topic
09:00 - 10:30	Paper session 1 (25 min + 5 min questions) Kostas Stefanidis, Evaggelia Pitoura and Panos Vassiliadis On Relaxing Contextual Preference Queries Ayis Ziotopoulos, Margarida Jacome and Gustavo de Veciana An RFID-based platform supporting context-aware computing in complex spaces Laurent Walter Goix, Massimo Valla, Laura Cerami and Paolo Falcarin Situation Inference for Mobile Users: a Rule Based Approach
10:30 - 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30	Paper session 2 (25 min + 5 min questions) Martin Jonsson Using a folksonomy approach for location tagging in community based presence systems Saira Parvez Khan and Sana Ismaeel Metropolitan Active Space: Introducing Context- Aware Services in GSM Networks Hyunjun Chang, Seokkyoo Shin and Changshin Chung Context Life Cycle Management Scheme in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
12:30	End of workshop, lunch break

Paper Submission

Papers should not exceed 5 pages double column including figures and tables and MUST be formatted according to standard IEEE 8.5x11 proceedings format (LaTeX formatting macros, Word format). Papers have to present original, English-language research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. The paper abstract should contain title, author name(s), and keywords. Papers have to be submitted electronically via the submission web page.

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings will be published by IEEE.

Important Dates

Paper submission:	March 7, 2007 (final deadline)
Notification:	March 21, 2007
Camera-ready papers:	March 30, 2007, 12:00 GMT - hard deadline
Workshop date:	May 7, 2007

Manfred Hauswirth, last updated: $Date: 2007-04-30 16:49:30 $