DASI '06: Bertinoro PhD School on Data and Service Integration
December 10 - 15, 2006
University Residential Centre of Bertinoro Bertinoro (Forlì), Italy


Preliminary program

MONDAY, DECEMBER 11
10:00am - 10:50am --- Data exchange (lecture 1)
10:50am - 11:10am --- Coffe break
11:10am - 12:00pm --- Data exchange (lecture 2)
02:00pm - 02:50pm --- Data integration (lecture 1)
02:50pm - 03:10pm --- Coffe break
03:10pm - 04:00pm --- Data integration (lecture 2)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12
10:00am - 10:50am --- Data integration (lecture 3)
10:50am - 11:10am --- Coffe break
11:10am - 12:00pm --- Data integration (lecture 4)
02:00pm - 02:50pm --- Data exchange (lecture 3)
02:50pm - 03:10pm --- Coffe break
03:10pm - 04:00pm --- Data exchange (lecture 4)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13
10:00am - 10:50am --- Data exchange (lecture 5)
10:50am - 11:10am --- Coffe break
11:10am - 12:00pm --- Data exchange (lecture 6)
02:00pm - 02:50pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 1)
02:50pm - 03:10pm --- Coffe break
03:10pm - 04:00pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 2)

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14
10:00am - 12:00pm --- Open session on research directions in Data integration, data exchange and service integration
02:00pm - 02:50pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 3)
02:50pm - 03:10pm --- Coffe break
03:10pm - 04:00pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 4)

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15
10:00am - 10:50am --- Data integration (lecture 5)
10:50am - 11:10am --- Coffe break
11:10am - 12:00pm --- Data integration (lecture 6)
02:00pm - 02:50pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 5)
02:50pm - 03:10pm --- Coffe break
03:10pm - 04:00pm --- Data-driven Web Services (lecture 6)



Course descriptions

Title: Data integration
Lecturer: Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini
Abstract: Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data. The problem of designing data integration systems is important in current real world applications, and is characterized by a number of issues that are interesting from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. In the last years, there has been a huge amount of research work on data integration, and a precise, clear picture of a systematic approach to such problem is now available. This course will present an overview of the research work carried out in the area of data integration, with emphasis on the theoretical results that are relevant for the development of data integration solutions. Special attention will be devoted to the following aspects: architectures for data integration, modeling a data integration application, processing queries in data integration, dealing with inconsistent data sources, and reasoning on queries.

Title: Data exchange
Lecturer: Prof. Phokion Kolaitis
Abstract: Data exchange (also known as data translation) is the problem of transforming data structured under one schema into data structured under another schema, so that certain constraints between the original data and the resulting data are satisfied. Data exchange is an old, but persistent and ubiquitous, problem in database systems; in fact, it has been called the "oldest problem in database systems". In recent years, researchers have embarked on a systematic investigation of data exchange and of its numerous connections with other areas of information management, most notably connections with information integration. This course will focus on data exchange between relational schemas, where the constraints between the two schemas are specified using schema mappings. Topics to be covered include: conjunctive queries and homomorphisms, tuple-generating dependencies and schema mappings specified by such dependencies, the chase procedure, universal solutions in data exchange the core of universal solutions, composing schema mappings, inverting schema mappings, and query answering in data exchange.

Title: Data-driven Web Services
Lecturer: Prof. Victor Vianu
Abstract: Many applications increasingly rely on services provided on the Web. Complex applications use Web service ``compositions'', consisting of several peers communicating with each asynchronously by exchanging messages. With the increased complexity of such applications comes increased vulnerability to costly bugs, so one central issue is to develop static analysis techniques to increase confidence in their robustness and correctness. The course will describe several formal models of Web service compositions and their use in automatic verification. First, we will discuss finite-state abstractions of Web service compositions as communicating Mealy machines. Properties to be verified pertain mostly to the sequence of messages exchanged in a run, usually referred to as ``conversations", and are expressed in some variant of temporal logic. Since this largely relies on classical model checking techniques, we will spend some time reviewing the basics of finite-state model checking, before surveying some of the results specific to Web service compositions. While finite-state abstractions are useful as a first step, in reality most Web services access an underlying database, and are therefore infinite-state systems. In such cases, finite-state abstractions are inadequate for capturing the semantics of the application and expressing the properties of interest. As the next step, we therefore focus on abstractions of Web service compositions that take into account the interaction with the database. This task is facilitated by the emergence of high-level specification tools for data-driven Web services, such as WebML. These tools not only result in improved program productivity, but, as a side effect, provide new opportunities for automatic verification.