Service Oriented Architectures, especially with the use of Web Services to provide loosely coupled approach to develop distributed systems, is gaining wide industry acceptance. The Semantic Web has emerged as the vision of the next generation of the web, in which meaning is associated with Web resources (data, documents and services) and represented in a machine processable form. LSDIS lab in our department is one of the oldest, largest and most significant research group in the world in the emerging area of Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services/Processes. Core faculty expertise comes from distributed databases and information systems, knowledge representation and AI, distributed systems and algorithms. This has resulted in substantial body of the work in ontology development, automatic metadata extraction and semantic annotation (with associated challenges in entity identification/recognition and resolution /disambiguation), semantic annotation of Web services (including a W3C submission on WSDL-S) and use of semantics in complete Web process life cycle, as well as scalable and high performance query processing and reasoning including RDF query processing and analysis of large RDF graphs for discovery of complex relationships (called semantic associations). Semantic applications in the areas of biology, health care, national security, financial services, and risk & compliance have been built. Emerging research now applying semantics to enable new capabilities at middleware and network levels. Researchers also have extensive collaboration with industry (e.g., IBM and CISCO), and are involved with many international bodies and initiatives including W3C, OASIS, and Eclipse.
