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Workshop proceedings here
Research on ontological engineering should focus on the content of information, besides the tools and languages in terms of which information is represented.
As a matter of fact, languages and tools enable the specification of ontologies, help in verifying their logical correctness, and endorse their suitability for information exchange. However, the ontologies themselves might provide no or little, or just informal explanation of their content.
Until now, two schools of thought have confronted concerning ontology content.
The first one claims that content is so much bound to context that efforts to define widely reusable ontological components are mostly useless: ontologies should be built based on agreement within communities of practice, or by good ol' craftmanship.
The other one claims the contrary: widely reusable components can be built, based on linguistic usage, following standard initiatives, or based on domain-independent principles derived from theoretical domains such as philosophy or the cognitive sciences.
We have good and bad examples of those approaches, but all of them are supposed to be applied in order to create a representation of the content of some domain, and in doing that a "core" ontology is often built to catch the central concepts and relations of the domain.
Instead of trying "yet another" meeting among proposers of top ontologies, the workshop looks for contributions that describe successful (or reasons for failure of) efforts to build core ontologies, possibly providing the principles of "well-foundedness" (or the reasons for their lack) for the ontologies.
By "successful" here we mean (at least one of) the following settings:
a) the core ontology has been used to reach an agreement on the types of entities (and their relationships) needed in a community of practice.
b) the core ontology is being used to dynamically negotiate the intended meaning across a distributed community
c) the core ontology has been used to align/integrate/merge several sources of metadata/ontologies/terminologies
d) the core ontology has been used to build more than one application or service
e) the core ontology has been adopted as a template for specifying the content in some domain
By "well-founded" here we mean (at least one of) the following settings:
a) the core ontology specializes a foundational or top-level ontology
b) the core ontology has been built through a well-motivated methodology that nonetheless avoids the reuse of a foundational ontology
c) the core ontology has "built-in" (but explicit) criteria for well-foundedness
Of course, good foundations and motivations can be subjective, and one role of the program committee will be to evaluate them. For this reason, we welcome contributions that "go directly to the point" for example by exposing the following structure:
1) description of the use case
2) description of the methods and principles used
3) description of the core ontology and the final product obtained by means of it.
Such a structure will enable the organizers to compare the contributions on a common ground.
The domains of application for core ontologies can be of any kind, e.g.:
- artifacts, design, e-commerce
- business processes, services
- law, finance, regulatory domains
- social interaction, multicultural issues
- biomedicine, bioinformatics
- agriculture, farming
- marketing, advertising
- cultural heritage, art
- etc.
Paper Submission Deadline 15th July 2004
Notification of Acceptance 29nd July 2004 (depending on the number of submissions)
Camera-ready Copy Deadline 25th August 2004
Workshop 8th October 2004
A full paper (not to exceed 8 pages), including title, author's name(s), affiliation, mailing address, telephone, fax and e-mail of the principal authors should reach the Organizing Committee on or before July 15, 2004. Papers will be accepted by electronic submission only (PDF format). Although not required for the initial submission, we recommend to follow the LNCS format guidelines for proceedings (http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,10735,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html). We will publish the workshop proceedings online at CEUR-WS (http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/).
At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register and present the paper at the workshop.
Submitted papers will be fully refereed based on the significance with respect to the workshop topics as well as on the technical relevance.
Submissions must be sent to both of the following addresses:
a.gangemi_at_istc.cnr.it
borgo_at_loa-cnr.it
Aldo Gangemi (contact person)
LOA - Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology (CNR), Rome, Italy
a.gangemi_at_istc.cnr.it
Stefano Borgo
LOA - Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology (CNR), Trento, Italy
borgo_at_loa-cnr.it
Hans Akkermans, VUA, Amsterdam
John Bateman, U. of Hamburg
Brandon Bennett, U. of Leeds
Joost Breuker, UVA, Amsterdam
Oscar Corcho, UPM Madrid and ISOCO, Madrid
Michael Gruninger, U. of Maryland and NIST
Enrico Motta, KMI, Open U., Milton Keynes
Natasha Noy, Stanford U.
Sofia Pinto, Technical U. of Lisbon
Alan Rector, U. of Manchester
Guus Schreiber, VUA, Amsterdam
Steffen Staab, U. of Karlsruhe
Laure Vieu, IRIT, Toulouse and ISTC-CNR, Trento
Krisztof Wecel, U. of Poznan
Chris Welty, Watson RC, IBM, US
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