Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Research lines:

    * Data Integration and Exchange

    * Ontology Based Information Systems

    * Data Warehousing, Data Quality and Data Cleaning

    * Digital Records Management and Preservation

    * Process and Workflow Management

    * Service Modeling

    * Service Synthesis and Composition

 

Members:

Tiziana Catarci, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini (leader), Massimo Mecella, Riccardo Rosati, Silvio Salza.

 

PhD Students:

Riccardo De Masellis, Claudio Di Ciccio, Paolo Felli, Andrea Marrella, Matteo Di Gioia.

 

Post Docs:

Massimiliano De Leoni, Fabio Patrizi, Antonella Poggi.

 

Our interest in Data Management dates back to the '80s, when the main research topics were conceptual modeling and schema integration, now evolved into Information Integration and Data Exchange. Information integration is the problem of combining the data residing at different heterogeneous sources, and providing a virtual unified view of these data, called global schema, which can be queried by the users. Data Exchange focuses instead on the problem of materializing the global schema according to the data retrieved from the sources. Both (virtual) data integration and data exchange have been recently studied in the context of a peer-to-peer (P2P) data management, where autonomous systems (peers) export data in terms of their own data schema, and import data from other peers to which their are connected through semantic mappings. Other Data Management topics related to Information Integration are also investigated, including Ontology-based Information Systems, View-based Query Processing, Data Quality, Data Cleaning, Record Matching and Instance Reconciliation, and Mobile Data Access.

 

Our research interests include several aspects of Service-Oriented Computing, and its relationship with Data Management. Services in our context are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed for the purpose of developing distributed interoperable applications. We are particularly interested in service modeling and automatic service composition. In this area, we proposed what in the community is now known as the "Roman model", and contributing to one of the first solutions to automated service composition. Since its introduction, the Roman model has been studied by several research groups worldwide, and is one of the key references in the formal approaches to automated service composition. We have also studied Service Synthesis, as well as Process and Workflow Management, with a special focus on principles and techniques for modeling the interaction between processes and data.

 

Data and Service Integration is considered one of the main challenges that Information Technology (IT) currently faces. It is highly relevant in classical IT applications, such as enterprise information management and data warehousing, as well as in scenarios like scientific computing, e-government, and web data management. Our long-term goal is to lay the foundations of a new generation of information integration and service composition systems, whose main characteristics are

(i) posing the semantics of the application domain at the center of the scene,

(ii) combining the management of data with the management of the processes and services using such data in the organization, and

(iii) shifting the role of the conceptual model from a design-time to a run-time artifact.

In our vision, the functionalities provided by the system include answering queries posed in terms of the conceptual model by suitably accessing the source data, performing updates over the conceptual models by invoking the appropriate updates on the sources, and realizing complex goals expressed by the client by automatically composing available services. The basic idea for realizing this goal is to combine principles, methods and techniques from different areas, namely, Data Management, Service-Oriented Computing, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Formal Methods.

 

Projects:
SM4All - Smart homes for all
September 2008 - August 2011  -  EU FP7

WORKPAD -An Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Software Infrastructure for Supporting
Collaborative Work of Human Operators in Emergency/Disaster Scenarios) 
September 2006 - August 2009  -   EU FP6

SemanticGov -Providing Integrated Public Services to Citizens at the National
and Pan-European level with the use of Emerging Semantic Web Technologies
January 2006 - April 2009  -  EU FP6

INTEROP 
January 2004 - December 2007  -  EU FP6 

eG4M - eGovernment for Mediterranean Countries
November 2005 - April 2009  -  MIUR FIRB

ESTEEM 
January 2006 - December 2007   -  MIUR PRIN

Project managed by Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia:
NEP4B
2006 - 2009  -   FIRB 2005

Project managed by CINI:
(Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale di Informatica)

TOCAI.IT - Tecnologie Orientate alla Conoscenza per Aggregazioni di Imprese in InterneT 
July 2006 - April 2010  -   MIUR