[SeCo Book Intro]
[Table of Contents]
[Book preview]

Book Preface

by Stefano Ceri and Marco Brambilla

Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica ed Informazione,
V. Ponzio 34/5, 20133 Milano, Italy
stefano.ceri | marco.brambilla @polimi.it

Who are the strongest European competitors on software ideas? Who is the best doctor to cure insomnia in a nearby hospital? Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field close to a sunny beach? This information is available on the Web, but no software system can accept such queries nor compute the answer. At most, users can identify sub-problems that can be addressed by specific search engines and interact with each of them serially, but then they have the responsibility of building global answers by manually composing results. Search Computing is a new multi-disciplinary discipline which will provide the abstractions, methods, tools and computing systems required to express these queries and to build their answer.

The emerging paradigm of software services has so far been neutral to search. Search Computing is an evolution of service computing focused on building the answers of complex queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using ranking as the dominant factor for service composition. New language and description paradigms are required for interconnecting services and for expressing queries. Semantic domain knowledge helps enriching terminological knowledge about objects being searched. New protocols help capturing ranking preferences and their refinement; new interfaces present complex results with simple visual descriptions. Ranking is relative to individuals and context and therefore reflects personal and social contributions. Economical and legal implications of Search Computing must be understood and mastered. In summary, Search Computing is a multi-disciplinary effort which requires adding to sound software principles contributions from other sciences such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economical and legal sciences.

The Search Computing (Seco) Project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), responding to the 2008 Call for “IDEAS Advanced Grants”, a program dedicated to the support of investigation-driven frontier research. SeCo started on November 1st, 2008 and will last until October 31, 2013 (see www.search-computing.eu.)  This book describes the outcome of the first SeCo “Workshop on Search Computing Challenges and Directions”, held in Como on June 17-19, 2009.

The book is divided in three parts. The first part gives visions of the current evolution in search, which is becoming more and more task-oriented and is now starting to use ontological knowledge in order to manage complex queries; these visions are marking the new trends in search.
The second part will present some background and related technologies.  These can be considered as parallel fields of research, useful both for setting the theoretical premises for Search Computing and for providing a technological framework for building Search Computing systems and applications.
The third part dwells into the technological problems and issues which arise when dealing with Search Computing as a new search paradigm. It provides a unified view of the results of Search Computing as achieved exactly after one year since its starting date.
The book is the result of a collective effort of all the project participants and has been reviewed with the help of the project’s advisory board members and of several other experts. We thank all of them for their effort.

[SeCo Book Intro]
[Table of Contents]
[Book preview]