[Colloq] Talk: Damian DG Gessler, Monday, October 1

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Damian DG Gessler

Who will speak on:
“SSWAP: Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol”

Monday, October 1, 2007
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.,
366 West Village H
Northeastern University


Abstract:
SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol; pronounced> "swap") is an architecture, protocol, and running platform for semantically integrating disparate data and services (see http://sswap.info, as in "swap info"). SSWAP is currently driving bioinformatic integration in the plant community under the Virtual Plant Information Network (http://vpin.ncgr.org), an NSF-funded semantic web services project. As an architecture, SSWAP establishes how data, service, and ontology providers, as well as clients and discovery servers can interact to allow for the description, querying, discovery, invocation, and response of semantic web services. SSWAP addresses the three basic requirements of any semantic web services architecture; i.e., i) a common syntax, ii) a shared semantic, and iii) semantic discovery) while addressing three technology limitations common in distributed service systems; i.e., i) the fatal mutability of traditional interfaces, ii) the rigidity and fragility of static subsumption hierarchies, and iii) the confounding of content, structure, and presentation. SSWAP uses the concept of a single, canonical OWL-DL graph to allow data and service providers to describe their resources, to allow discovery servers to offer semantically rich search engines, to allow clients to discover and invoke those resources, and to allow providers to respond with semantically tagged data. The architecture underlies the VPIN platform that is being deployed to aid in integrating plant bioinformatic resources.

Brief Biography
Damian DG Gessler, Program Lead
Dr. Gessler received a double-major in Biology and Mathematics at Beloit College, Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Population Genetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr. Gessler's biological expertise is in evolution and population genetics as studied via computational techniques. He has used this to delineate conditions favorable for the evolution of recombination and meiosis, and to quantify the rate of Muller's ratchet in populations unable to achieve mutation-selection balance.
Dr. Gessler's informatic expertise is in simulation, modeling, and data integration. He has over 20 yrs experience in computer programming and systems operations. Recent work focuses on the challenges of integrating data and services from across the web using semantic web services.