Section: Other Grants and Activities

International Actions

Interop V-Lab

Participants : Nacer Boudjlida [ responsible ] , Khalid Benali, François Charoy, Olivier Perrin, Hala Skaf-Molli.

Follow-up the INTEROP Network of Excellence, The INTEROP V-Lab (International Virtual Laboratory on interoperability, http://www.interop-vlab.eu/ ) has been officially created in Brussels on March 2007 as an international non-profit making association (serving the international interest). In this context, Nancy played also a leading role in the definition of the V-Lab and in the settlement of the so-called INTEROP V-Lab “pole” (a partner of the INTEROP V-Lab): the Grande Region pole. The Grande Region pole encompasses University of Namur, University of Paris I La Sorbonne, University Henri Poincaré Nancy 1 and University of Nancy 2). It is defined as a Scientific (International) Interest Group (Groupement d'Intérêt Scientifique or GIS). Its attachment to the INTEROP V-Lab has been achieved in may 2009.

Associate Team INRIA VanaWeb

ECOO is involved in the Associate Team INRIA VanaWeb (with UTFSM Valparaìso, Chili) which is interested in autonomous constraint solving concepts and their application to composition problems for Web services. The coordinators of this project are Carlos Castro (UTFSM Valparaìso, Chili) and Christophe Ringeissen (CASSIS ).

Tunisie, eGov, INRIA-DGRST project

This project involves the ECOO LORIA team-project from Nancy, the SOC team from the IRIT lab in Toulouse and the SOIE team from ENSI in Tunis.

The Egov project is a franco-tunisian project funded by the DGRST and INRIA. Its goal is to combine multi-agent technology and workflow technology to enhance the flexibility of process execution involving multiple government agencies. During this year, we have started to study different dimensions of modeling of the Tunisian process for company registration, from a centralized point of view to a decentralized one. We have also started to work on the problem of communication and of security between the different partners of the cooperation. The complete process model has been developed and implemented on Bonita.

Semantic-based Support for Collaborative Design Activity, Stic-Amsud project

The participants pf this two-years (2008-2009) Stic-Amsud project are the LORIA ECOO and Orpailleur teams, the Lifia, University of La Plata (UNLP), (Argentina), The Intermidia lab at the SCC-Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brasil), and the COmputer science Dept. of the Universidad Tecnica federico Santa-Maria (UTFSM) in Valparaiso (Chile).

The goal of the project was to study the use of semantic technologies to better support computer-based collaborative design activities. The work was focused on studying the integration of knowledge extraction approaches based on combining NLP (Natural Language Processing) and FCA (Formal Concept Analysis) in a collaborative platform to support assisted collaborative construction of shared knowledge[14] .

The project participants have written a book chapter [46] and, based on this document, have organized a one-day tutorial at the Webmedia conference. They have also organizes the 1st Semantic Web Spring School at UTFSM-Valparaiso (Chile) in October 2009.

Peer-to-Peer Semantic wikis for Distributed Knowledge Building, MINCyT Project

Participants : Hala Skaf-Molli, Pascal Molli.

The objective of the project is to offer concepts and mechanisms for the creation, manipulation and the emergence of shared knowledge in large communities. Our initial hypothesis is that the shared knowledge will emerge during collaborative editing of semantically annotated content shared by a community: members of a community work together to create shared annotated content that gradually move from an unstructured towards a structured and formalized content.

Our approach is to use a class of existing tools: semantic wikis. A wiki is an online asynchronous collaborative editor. It allows you to edit content through a web browser. A semantic wiki is an extension of traditional wikis by adding semantic capabilities. The semantic annotations can be imported from well-defined ontology. The aim of the project is to extend the working modes in semantic wikis for including:

• Capabilities to edit ontologies. This will transform the semantic wiki into a collaborative ontology editor.

• Peer-to-peer and optimistic replication capabilities. This allows supporting scalability and choosing knowledge propagation and integration by community.

• Mechanism to manage divergence and the different viewpoints.

The participants of the project are: ECOO and Orpailleur team from Loria and Lifia-UNLP (Argentina)

The results are published in [36] , [37] , [44] .

The project is funded by international scientific cooperation program MINCyT (Argentine)/INRIA-CNRS (France)

Postdoctoral Cooperation

• Boualem Benatallah at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, for two years.

• Ustun Yildiz has joined the Genome center of University of California in Davis in Bertram Ludascher's group.

Co-advisory of PhD Thesis

• PhD Thesis of Charbel Rahhal with University Lebanese of Beyrouth (2006-2009): collaborative editing processes for peer-to-peer networks (Pascal Molli and Hala Skaf-Molli).

• PhD Thesis of Hassina Talantikite and thesis of Abdelmalek Boudries with Béjaïa University, Algeria (Nacer Boudjlida)

• PhD Thesis of Salah Hamri with Constantine University, Algeria (Nacer Boudjlida).