The program specifics for CANHEIT 2008 are becoming available online.
The enhanced abstract for one of my presentations is as follows:

From the Core to the Edge: Automating Awareness of Network Topology through Knowledge Representation

Ian Lumb – Manager Network Operations, Computing and Network Services (York University)

Abstract

Like many other institutions of higher education, York University makes extensive use of Open Source software. This is especially true in the case of monitoring and managing IP (Internet Protocol) devices. On the monitoring front, extensive manual configuration is currently required to make monitoring solutions (e.g., NAGIOS) aware of the topology of the York network. And with respect to managing, NetDisco automatically discovers assets placed on the network, but is unable to abstract away unnecessary complexity in, e.g., rendering schematics of the network topology. These and other examples suggest that NAGIOS and NetDisco operate in the realm of data, and possibly information, but are unable to envisage network topology from a knowledge-representation perspective. Thus the current focus is on applying a recently developed knowledge-representation platform to such routine requirements in network monitoring and management. The platform is based on Sematic Web standards and implementations and has already been proven effective in various scientific contexts. Ultimately our objective is to extract data automatically discovered by NetDisco, represent it using the knowledge-based platform, and transform a topology-aware representation of the data into configuration data that can be ingested by NAGIOS.

A visual representation of the approach is illustrated below.