MTSR 2009

Last week, IE members Miguel-Ángel Sicila and Ramiro Cano were attending the MTSR 2009 conference, held in Milan, in the University of Milano-Bicocca. This bianual conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in metadata, its representation, its semantics and its diverse applications to Information Systems.

Apart from the conference, there was a little time for entertainment, including the social dinner which took place at the wonderful location of Grand Hotel Villa Torretta.

From left to right: Ramiro Cano, Miguel-Ángel Sicilia, Cristian Cechinel and Juan Manuel Dodero

 

ITA 2009

This week the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 2009) is taking place in Wrexham, North Wales. ITA is a series of bianual conferences usually held in september, where the athmosphere and the good ambiance between all the participants make of it one of our favourite conferences around.

IE regularly contributes one or more papers reporting on the research being carried out during the last year. In ITA 2009 our presentation was about the integration of semantic web frameworks in SOA architectures (check out the full presentation here).

From left to right: Vic Grout and Rich Picking (conference chairs), Thomas Gottron, Stuart Cunningham and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso

This photo was taken during the mediaeval Welsh banquet celebrated in the Ruthin Castle as part of the social program of the conference. It shows IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso relaxing with our old friends and colleagues of the CAIR research group of the Glyndwr University lead by Prof. Vic Grout (first one from the left) .

 

IE members meet Richard Messnarz

This week Dr. Richard Messnarz, executive director of ISCN, visited Alcalá de Henares to attend to Eurospi 2009. IE group was contacted by some members of ISCN to explore paths for collaboration in the framework of the Knowledge Partnership program for Process Improvement that ISCN is carrying out, but also  to exchange ideas on future joint proposals for EU funded projects. Richard and the rest of the people we met were very nice and kind, and very keen to start a collaboration with our group, by the way. In the photo below, chairmen of EuroSPI and IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador sharing table and some friendly conversation in El pollo de Alcala, where we had lunch together.

From left to right: Miklos Biro, Kerstin Siakas, Miguel Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Richard Messnarz.

 

Ontose 2009

Today IE members Daniel Rodriguez and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso are attending to Ontose 2009, the latest edition of a series of bianual workshops on ontologies for information systems and engineering. Ontose was conceived as a forum promoting challenging discussions and cross-fertilization over multidisciplinary research areas from the ontologies point of view.

This year’s edition has has been organized by the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Austria) as part of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems, CAISE 2009. We have been lucky enough as to count with the presence of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the field of ontology in computer science. His keynote on the ontological foundations of Service Science has been not only thought provoking but also very interesting from the point of view of the challenges that the new service-based economy will have to face in the near future. In the photo below these lines, Christian Kop from Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Nicola Guarino and IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso.

 

Open health Spain 2009

Yesterday and today the first Open Health Spain symposium on clinical interoperability issues is taking place in Alcala. Organized by the IE, ATOS Research and Innovation and the Fuenlabrada University Hospital, this symposium aims at gathering together researchers and practitioners in the field of Health interoperability in Spain.

Pablo Serrano (Fuenlabrada Univ. Hospital), Josema Cavanillas (ATOS R&I) and Miguel A. Sicilia (Univ. of Alcala) in the first session

 

Una CITA 2009

Next year’s SPDECE event will be cellebrated in Mérida (Mexico) together with other three events related to learning technology in the Latin-American area.

The name of the joint event is CITA 2009 (“cita” in Spanish means “appointment”). The conference will accept papers in English and in Spanish and it will represent a major event in learning technology and particularly in research related to “learning objects”.

 

Closing time for SPDECE’08

First night was used as an excuse to keep on talking about learning objects at the local Irish Pub in Salamanca. At 3.00 am the streets of Salamanca were almost empty, however we still found life beings in the corners.

The morning after, Miguel Angel acted as a keynote speaker with his talk “Learning objects, lies and videos in youTube”. Below a moment of his talk, one of the activities of the last day of SPDECE 2008. Look at the picture. Who is in the slide?

 

SPDECE’08 – First day

Elena García, Salvador Sánchez and Miguel-Angel Sicilia are attending SPDECE’08 – the fifth edition of the Latin-american scope pluri-disciplinary conference on “learning objects”. Around 80 attendees will discuss on reusability, pedagogy and technology of educational resources. Since the conference series was initiated in 2004 by Information Engineering members, we feel more than at home, and with the years a small community of colleagues and friends has been formed. So, this is also good time for meeting old friends.

The spanish newspaper ABC has echoed the event in its technology supplement:

http://abc.hoytecnologia.com/noticias/Universidad-Pontificia-Salamanca-analiza/80401

 

JISBD 2008 Conference

Last week, Daniel Rodríguez attended the Spanish conference JISBD 2008, Gijón. A conference hard to forget for the quality of the food! (it is time to be careful until Christmas). Gijón is also a great place to visit.

In the photo, from left to right, Jose Riquelme, Roberto Ruiz (both from the University of Seville), and Daniel.

 

Final day -WSKS08

The last day I had the opportunity to present news about the Open Research Society, basically the information in the new Web site of the NGO: http://the-ors.org

We hope that this helped for some people to be interested in the society to a degree in which they want to volunteer. After that, awards were given to the best papers, and the conference continued in the afternoon.

Surprisingly, the atmosphere at the sessions even improved when approaching the end of the conference (might be that the participants felt more comfortable with the others with time, thanks to the informal discussions at coffee break and lunch time). At the end of the day, I was sitting at the registration table, relaxing a little bit after three days of intense bombing of ideas.

In the image, left to right, Ambjörn Naeve, Maria Pavlis-Korres, me (Miguel-Angel Sicilia) and Miltiadis Lytras.