18 Jul 2011
Barcelona, Spain
============================== CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ARCOE-11 at IJCAI-11 Date: July 18 2011 (*NEW*) Barcelona, Spain Accepted contributions: http://www.arcoe.org/2011/abstracts.html ============================== The IJCAI-11 Workshop on Automated Reasoning about Context and Ontology Evolution (ARCOE-11) http://www.arcoe.org/2011 held on 18 July 2011 at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11) -- Description of the workshop -- Methods of automated reasoning have solved a large number of problems in Computer Science by using formal ontologies expressed in logic-based languages. Over the years, though, each problem or class of problems has required a different ontology, and sometimes a different version of logic. Moreover, the processes of designing, controlling and maintaining an ontology as well as its different versions have turned out to be inherently complex. All this has motivated much investigation in a wide range of disparate disciplines -- from logic-based Knowledge Representation and Reasoning to Software Engineering, from Databases to Multimedia -- about how to relate ontologies to one another. ARCOE-11 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from core areas of Artificial Intelligence (Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Contexts, and Ontologies) and related disciplines to discuss these kinds of problems and relevant results. Historically, there have been at least three different, yet interdependent motivations behind this type of research: defining the relationship between an ontology and its context; providing support to ontology engineers; enhancing problem solving and communication for software agents. Ontology and Context. Most application areas have recognised the need for representing and reasoning about knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Such knowledge, as well as its intrinsic relevance and usability, depends on its context. The latter is determined by the syntactic and/or semantic structure of the resources, the scope of the underlying language, among other things. Research on information integration, distributed knowledge management, the semantic web, multi-agent and distributed reasoning have pinned down different aspects of how ontologies relate to and/or develop within their context. Ontology Engineering. Ontology engineers are not supposed to succeed right from the beginning when (individually or collaboratively) developing and maintaining an ontology. Despite their expertise and any assistance from domain experts, revision cycles are the rule. Moreover quite often different ontologies have to be integrated in such a way for them to be operable together (merging). Research on the automation of the process of engineering an ontology has improved efficiency and reduced the introduction of unintended meanings by means of interactive ontology editors that provide support for ontology change (debugging, updates and repair), maintenance (versioning) and integration (merging). Moreover, ontology matching has studied the process of manual, off-line alignment of two or more known ontologies. Problem Solving and Communication for Agents. Agents that communicate with one another without having full access to their respective ontologies or that are programmed to face new non-classifiable situations must change their own ontology dynamically at run-time -- they cannot rely solely on human intervention. Research on this problem has either concentrated on techniques borrowed from the non-monotonic reasoning and belief revision communities or on changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology's language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory. This is also an important issue in the emerging area of General Game Playing. ARCOE-11 will provide a multi-disciplinary forum, where differences in methodologies, representation languages and techniques are over-arched and hopefully overcome. Accordingly, the workshop will be structured into four tracks: three of them will focus on specific areas, the fourth one will foster links and integration. Track 1: Context and Ontology This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme of Context and Ontology, a well-established research area that has mainly concentrated on the relationship between contexts and ontologies for distributed information and for the enhancement of software agents. Track 2: Common Sense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme of Common Sense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning in logic-based Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for ontologies. These are classic areas of AI, which since their origins have produced remarkable results on logic-based methods for supporting knowledge engineers and for enhancing software agents. Track 3: Automated Ontology Evolution This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme of Automated Ontology Evolution for agents and general problem solving, an area which in recent years has been drawing the attention of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning on the assessment of change impact and the automation of ontology evolution. Track 4: Links and integration This track will foster links and integration by means of invited talks and (panel) discussions. Topics that are likely to be covered are: the formalisation of software engineering concepts for ontology development; the relationship between automated reasoning and information retrieval; relationships between representation languages; relationships between canonical domains; relationships between contexts and ontology evolution and between non-monotonic reasoning and ontology evolution. ARCOE-11 will bring the participants to position the various approaches with respect to one another. Hopefully, though, the workshop will also start a process of cross-pollination and set out the constitution of a truly interdisciplinary research community dedicated to automated reasoning about contexts and ontology evolution. -- Attendance and Important Dates -- Please check the IJCAI-11 website for registration procedure, fees as well as cancellation policies. Early registration: 17 May 2011 Late registration: Please check the IJCAI-11 website Workshop date: 18 July 2011 N.B.: When registering for the workshop at the IJCAI-11 website, please make sure you select a 1-day workshop. -- Special Issue on ARCOE-related Themes -- There has recently been an agreement with the Journal of Web Semantics for a Special Issue on Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web. The Call for Papers is open to anyone and it certainly is an opportunity to submit for publication quality work about ARCOE-like themes. The special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web as seen from various perspectives, e.g., ontology integration, ontology development, ontology evolution etc. 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). Have a look at the Call for Papers on: http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/announcement/view/1 For further details please send requests to: organization [at] arcoe [dot] org -- Workshop Co-Chairs -- Alan Bundy - http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK. Tel: +44-131-650-2716, Fax: +44-131-650-6899 Jos Lehmann - http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Jos_Lehmann.html School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK. Tel: +44-131-650-2725, Fax: +44-131-650-6899 Ivan Varzinczak (primary contact) - http://en.varzinczak.net16.net CSIR Meraka Institute and University of KwaZulu-Natal Meiring Naude Road, CSIR, 0001 Pretoria, South Africa. Tel: +27-12-841-2594, Fax: +27-12-841-4720 -- Program Committee -- - Franz Baader (TU Dresden, Germany) - Christoph Benzmueller (Articulate Software, USA) - Richard Booth (University of Luxembourg and Mahasarakham University, Thailand) - Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento, Italy) - Jim Delgrande (Simon Fraser University, Canada) - Jerome Euzenat (INRIA & LIG, France) - Nicola Fanizzi (University of Bari, Italy) - Giorgos Flouris (FORTH, Greece) - Chiara Ghidini (FBK Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy) - Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento, Italy) - Deborah McGuinness (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA) - Thomas Meyer (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa) - Alessandra Mileo (Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland) - Amedeo Napoli (LORIA CNRS, France) - Maurice Pagnucco (The University of New South Wales, Australia) - Valeria de Paiva (Cuil Inc., USA) - Jeff Pan (University of Aberdeen, UK) - Dimitris Plexousakis (FORTH, Greece) - Guilin Qi (Southeast University, China) - Marcio Ribeiro (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil) - Luciano Serafini (FBK Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy) - Renata Wassermann (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)