Program &  proceedings

Technical focus

Application area

Organizers

The DIVO 2004 workshop is exploring the use of database technology in virtual organizations. A virtual organization is a dynamically formed coalition of parties from different home organizations who want to cooperate with one another to reach a common goal, often within a very short time frame. Virtual organizations arise in business, government, educational, and military contexts, often in response to opportunities or challenges that cannot be anticipated in advance and require a rapid response. Virtual organizations have information sharing needs that cross traditional organizational boundaries and require rapid deployment; they cannot be fully satisfied using traditional database technology.   

Technical Focus:  Information Integration for Virtual Organizations

Information relevant to a virtual organization is likely to reside in a variety of sources, such as in-field sensors, remote sensing systems, video, human reports, in-house and external databases, GIS sources, etc. These heterogeneous information sources are likely to belong to separate autonomous organizations, and the organizations may or may not trust one another. The objective of information integration research for virtual organizations is to provide seamless access to integrated multimodal data to users in the format most useful for their task and in the time frame that they require, while still adhering to the information sharing policies of the data owners.

Application Area:  Crisis Management

Coping with crisis situations that arise due to natural or man-made causes is a critical challenge for modern society. Crisis management refers to the activities encompassing the immediate response to a disaster event (damage assessment, response needs assessment, response prioritization), recovery efforts, mitigation, and preparedness efforts to reduce the impact of possible future crises, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, floods, attacks on physical, computing, or communication infrastructures, biological and chemical attacks, and nuclear emergencies. For example, in the case of an earthquake, response activities include coordination and mobilization of rescue operations, resource and logistic planning (e.g., triage, medical care, food, water, shelter), evacuation planning (of people, machinery, and property), situation monitoring, and timely information dissemination to citizens, news media, agencies, and hospitals. In each of these steps, timely access to the right information by the right person/agency/team at the required level of detail is key to the success of the operation. One fundamental cause for high response latency is the limitations of existing information, computation, and communication infrastructures in collecting, processing, interpreting, integrating, prioritizing, and disseminating large amounts of diverse types of unstructured information over potentially damaged, unreliable, insecure, and partially available network and communication infrastructures. Another impediment is the lack of sophisticated techniques for logistics and resource planning, and decision making in the presence of unreliable and imprecise information.  

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Conference Organization

DIVO co-chairs
Ramesh Jain, Georgia Institute of Technology, jain at ece.gatech.edu
Sharad Mehrotra, University of California at Irvine, sharad at ics.uci.edu
Marianne Winslett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, winslett at cs.uiuc.edu

Program committee
Jim Basney, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Chaitan Baru, San Diego Supercomputing Center
Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Kevin Chang, University of Illinois
Max Egenhofer, University of Maine
Alon Halevy, University of Washington
Ramesh Jain, Georgia Tech
Chen Li, UC Irvine
Sharad Mehrotra, UC Irvine
Wolfgang Nejdl, Learning Lab of Lower Saxony and University of Hannover
Pierangela Samarati, University of Milan
Kent Seamons, Brigham Young University
Bhavani Thuraisingham, National Science Foundation
Marianne Winslett, University of Illinois