IEEE Workshop on
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Invited Talk:
"Scientific Data Integration: From the Big Picture to some Gory Details"
Dr. Bertram Ludaescher, Associate Professor
Dept. of Computer Science & Genome Center
University of California, Davis
ABSTRACT. Many scientific disciplines, ranging from nuclear physics, over computational chemistry, geoinformatics,
bioinformatics, ecoinformatics,to astronomy and cosmology are highly dependent on effective and efficient ways
to manage and integrate scientific data. In this talk, I will focus on the scientific data integration challenges from two
large-scale NSF/ITR projects, the Geosciences Network (GEON), which is building "cyberinfrastructure" and tools
for the geosciences community, and the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) having a similar
mission to enable data integration and analysis for the ecological sciences. Looking at the big picture, it turns out that
data integration is only one aspect of a set of larger scientific data management and analysis challenges.
Technologies in support of design and execution of scientific workflows, including knowledge-based approaches,
are beginning to address these larger issues. While interest in scientific workflows is gaining momentum, many of
the gory details still require considerable attention and research effort. In the second part of this talk, I will drill-down
into some of these issues, such as the use of knowledge representation techniques to support data integration and
scientific workflow design and their relation to current data integration techniques studied by the database community.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER. Dr. Ludaescher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at
UC Davis, faculty member of the UC Davis Genome Center, and Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center,
UC San Diego. His primary research interests are in scientific data management, in particular scientific data integration,
scientific workflow management, and knowledge-based extensions thereof. Until his move to Davis, he was a member
of the NIH-funded Biomedical Informatics Research Network Coordination Center (BIRN-CC) at UC San Diego, focusing
on database mediation and knowledge representation issues. He is actively involved in several large-scale, collaborative
scientific data management projects, i.e., the DOE Scientific Data Management Center (SciDAC/SDM), the NSF/ITR
Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK), and NSF/ITR Geosciences Network (GEON). Dr. Ludaescher
received his MS in Computer Science from the Technical University of Karlsruhe in 1992 and his PhD in Computer Science
from the University of Freiburg in 1998 (both in Germany). From 1998 to 2004 he worked as a researcher at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center, at the end as a lab director for Knowledge-Based Information Systems.