14-16 May 2010
Toronto, Canada
Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies
13th INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON NON-MONOTONIC REASONING
May 14-16, 2010
Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada
http://ksg.meraka.org.za/nmronto2010/
Classical reasoning over ontologies has reached the point where it can
deal with large real-world ontologies. This can largely be attributed to
advances in research on description logics (DLs). A good example is the
medical ontology SNOMED-CT, containing over 300,000 concepts and millions
of binary relationships between them. SNOMED-CT can be represented as a DL
ontology, and its subsumption hierarchy can be computed in a matter of
minutes.
The obvious next step now is to extend reasoning over ontologies to cover
non-classical cases, such as commonsense reasoning, a well established
branch of AI. The first steps in that direction have been done by the
ontology community, and while research along these lines has already
resulted in initial tangible results, there is a need for a more coherent
approach in order to speed up progress.
This need provides interesting challenges to both the ontology and
commonsense reasoning communities. For the commonsense reasoning community
it is a chance to determine to what extent techniques developed in its
sub-areas, like non-monotonic reasoning (NMR), can be tailored to the
requirements of the ontology community. For the ontology community it is
an opportunity to determine whether existing results in this area can be
sharpened and improved on by referring to results in the broader area of
commonsense reasoning.
The topic of the workshop will hence be combining commonsense reasoning
approaches and techniques with ontologies. One of the main motivations is
to bring ideas from the well developed area of non-monotonic reasoning,
e.g. reasoning about actions, argumentation and belief revision, for
discussion in the realm of ontology engineering: evolution, debugging,
update, merging, etc. Certainly these tasks can benefit from most of the
advances in NMR and give new insights for research in that area as well.
Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies will be of interest
to:
1.
Researchers in the ontology community, particularly DL
researchers, interested in extending ontological reasoning to
non-classical cases.
2.
Researchers in the knowledge representation and commonsense
reasoning community interested in applying existing NMR techniques to the
area of ontologies.
This workshop will focus on an emerging hot topic. As such, one of its
immediate outcomes will be boosting a new and exciting hybrid research
domain combining commonsense reasoning and knowledge engineering for
ontologies.
Co-Chairs
Ivan Jos Varzinczak
Meraka Institute, CSIR
Pretoria, South Africa
Phone: +27 12 841 33 23
http://ksg.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak
Renata Wassermann
Instituto de Matemtica e Estatstica
Universidade de So Paulo, Brazil
Phone: +55 11 3091 96 87
http://www.ime.usp.br/~renata