Aims and Scope

The growing need of sharing data and digital resources in open networked systems requires to go beyond conventional information integration techniques and semantic interoperability architectures, in order to face the new challenging requirements that arise in the current evolving web of millions of autonomous peers which need to cooperate by dynamically discovering and sharing their resources, such as data or services.

Data and services have thus to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting peers do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand and do not have a complete picture of the context where the interaction occurs. Conversely, peers dynamically produce new information or knowledge, create new semantic communities, and establish new forms of semantic interoperability, based on dynamic, trustful agreements on common interpretations within the context of a given task, referred to as "emergent semantics".

To face the new requirements of emergent semantics cooperation further research work is required with contributions from different communities such as distributed systems/services, data and information semantics, ontologies and semantic web.

The ESTEEM workshop - to be held in conjunction with DEBS 2008 International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems - originates from the ESTEEM research project and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different communities on the theme of emergent semantics and cooperation in open networked systems to share their ideas, views, and progresses on new solutions, systems, and techniques.

The venue will be the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica "Antonio Ruberti", Sapienza Università di Roma, Via Ariosto 25 (map), Roma, Italy.