Elective in Software and Services (academic year 2010/2011)


The Italian name of this course is Complementi di software e servizi per la società dell'informazione.


Who is the professor that is responsible of the course. Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini.
For whom is this course. This 12 credits course is for the students of the Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica (Facoltà di Ingegneria dell'Informazione) and the Master in Computer Engineering (School of Information Engineering) of the Sapienza Università di Roma. The course is taught in English, and there will be no edition in Italian. For the Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica, this course is one of the characterizing courses of the section "Software and services for the information society" (indirizzo "Software e servizi per la società dell'informazione"). This course is also for students of the PhD program in Ingegneria Informatica (Computing Engineering). Typically, such students will follow only one or two sections.
Which is the structure of the course. The course is structured in 4 sections, which are described below. Each section corresponds to 3 credits, is constituted by approximately 30 lectures, and is taught by a professor in a given semester (note that different sections are taught in different semesters). Students will do the exam for the various sections, and for each section, they must follow the indications given in the web page of the section. The final exam will be registered by the course coordinator (Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini), and the grade will depend on the grades obtained in the various sections. Not all student will take all the sections of this course. For example, a student who have a 6 credit exam given in a previous Corso di Laurea that has been approved by the Consiglio d'Area as valid for 6 credit in elective, will take only 6 credits for this course, and therefore follow only 2 sections, and, generally, s/he will decide which sections to choose. When a student has passed the exam of the required sections, s/he should send a message to Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini (lenzerini [at] dis.uniroma1.it) asking to register the exam. Please, look at the news in this page for the dates where registration is scheduled.
When are the lectures of the different sections scheduled? Section 3 is scheduled in the first semester, whereas Sections 1,2 and 4 are scheduled in the second semester. Follow the "additional information" link of each section (see below) for the exact schedule of the corresponding lectures.
What to do to follow this course. The student who wants to follow this course in the academic year 2010/2011 must send an e-mail to Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini (lenzerini [at] dis.uniroma1.it) within November 15, 2010, specifying the sections s/he must follow.

News.

  • February 28, 2012 We remind the students that the registration of the exam is for the whole course "Elective in Software and Services", and not for the single sections. Once the student has passed all the sections, (s)he can book for registering the exam. The date for the next registration of the exams will posted here. Only students who have booked through Infostud can register the exam. The students should bring all documents about the outcome of the various sections of the course.

  • Section 1: Information Integration
    • Teacher: Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini
    • Number of credits: 3
    • Lectures: Second semester (March-May 2011)
    • Programme: Information 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 information 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 section 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 information integration solutions. Special attention will be devoted to the following aspects: architectures for information integration, modeling an information integration application, processing queries in information integration, data exchange, and reasoning on queries.
    • Additional information: see the web site of the Information Integration section
  • Section 2: Service Integration
    • Teacher: Prof. Giuseppe De Giacomo
    • Number of credits: 3
    • Lectures: First semester (September-December 2010)
    • Programme: Services, sometimes called web-services or e-services, are platform agnostic programs that publicly declare and export their behaviour so as to be invoked by interested clients. Services are typically associated to standard software programs that actually implement their behavior. Service Integration is the problem of combining (or "composing") services and using them so as to provide new services of interests to the client even if these new services are not directly linked to concrete software programs. In this section, we will investigate the formal foundations on automated service integration and composition. We will mainly concentrate on integration of process-oriented services (vs. integration of data oriented services, which is quite close to data integration), and we will establish connection to planning in AI, on the one hand, and connection to reactive process-synthesis and verification in CS, on the other.
    • Additional information: see the web site of the Service Integration section
  • Section 3: Semantic Web
    • Teacher: Prof. Riccardo Rosati
    • Number of credits: 3
    • Lectures: First semester (September-December 2010)
    • Programme: The Semantic Web is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims at overcoming some limitations of the current Web technologies in the representation of information. In particular, the goal of the Semantic Web is to extend the current Web technologies in order to allow for the explicit and machine-readable representation of the semantics of information and services on the Web, making it
      possible for Web applications to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. This section will provide a survey of the Semantic Web architecture and of the current enabling technologies for the Semantic Web. In particular, the section will present the current W3C standard languages
      for the Semantic Web: (1) the basic Semantic Web representation languages, i.e., RDF and RDF Schema; (2) the SPARQL query language for accessing RDF information sources; (3) the languages of the OWL family, which constitute the standard languages for the specification of ontologies in the Semantic Web.

    • Additional information: see the web site of the Semantic Web section
  • Section 4: Information Visualization
    • Teacher: Prof. Giuseppe Santucci
    • Number of credits: 3
    • Lectures: Second semester (March-May 2011)
    • Programme: The main goal of information visualization is to reveal the structure, extract meaning, and navigate large and abstract data sets (vs. scientific data visualization, cartography, and computer graphics, not addressed in this course), using interactive computer based representations that utilize the powerful processing capabilities of the human eyes. The increasing interest about information visualization has lead to the development of many interesting and effective ideas about how to visualize abstract information. This course will present a comprehensive survey of existing approaches, focusing on how to present information clearly and effectively; moreover, it will analyze the factors that contribute to success or lack, allowing to evaluate a given visualization and to devise future successful visualizations.
    • Additional information: see the web site of the Information Visualization section


Past editions


Office hours of Maurizio Lenzerini. Tuesday, 5:00 pm, at the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica "Antonio Ruberti", via Ariosto 25, Roma, second floor, room B203 (if available), or room B217 (otherwise) -- please, look at the last minute news for the next office hours