Logic List Mailing Archive

CfP special issue of Journal of Web Semantics on "Reasoning with context", Deadline: 15 Jun 2011

Call for Papers:
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Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
   "Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web"
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   Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important 
factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and 
robust reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate 
heterogeneous knowledge or to use homogeneous knowledge across different 
domains.

   Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on 
formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the 
semantics of a software's domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web 
as well as on information integration, distributed knowledge management, 
multi-agent and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship 
between an ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to 
relate knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic 
Web specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be 
captured by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use 
of provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and 
querying (to facilitate reasoning).

   Other neighbouring research areas, though, have also investigated topics 
that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. 
Ontology Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the 
problems faced by ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an 
ontology. The yielded automation of the process of ontology development 
and of its phases (e.g. knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment 
with pre-existing ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the 
introduction of unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made 
explicit the relationship between an ontology and its development context. 
Finally, research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored 
how an agent's ontology needs to change at run-time because of 
interactions with its context ? for instance with other agents whose 
ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world situations. 
This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the 
evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, 
belief revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the 
ontology's language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory.

* Topics of interest:

   This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with 
context in the Semantic Web from the integration, development and 
evolutionary perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may 
describe either theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain 
to the Semantic Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should present 
either Semantic Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or 
approaches that have characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic 
Web (e.g., scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of 
value to a larger community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web 
sub-community (e.g. revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).

   Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in 
the Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to:

- Named graphs
- Provenance
- Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
- Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
- Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
- Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
- Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
- Non-classical belief revision
- Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context versioning
- Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
- Information and knowledge integration
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge management
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
- Ontology-based data access
- Querying
- Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
- Temporal and spatial reasoning
- Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
- General problem solving for semantic technologies
- Machine learning for the Semantic Web
- Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

* How to submit

   Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload 
submissions on Elsevier's Electronic Submission System at

http://ees.elsevier.com/jws

Choose "Reasoning with context in SW" as article type. See the link "Guide 
Authors" on the above url for instructions.

* Important dates:

- Submission deadline: 15 June 2011
- First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
- Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
- Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
- Tentative publication date: April 2012

* Guest editors:

Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ivan Varzinczak (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa)

Send enquiries and communications to: organization [at] arcoe [dot] org

--
Ivan Jos Varzinczak - http://krr.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Meraka Institute, CSIR
Pretoria, South Africa