The notion of ontology as a formally specified conceptualization shared by a community of practice is now well established and is used and applied in several areas, including knowledge management, knowledge acquisition, information retrieval and extraction, knowledge engineering and knowledge modelling. The essential role of an ontology is to support reuse, which can take place in different scenarios. For instance ontologies have been used to support the specification of reusable libraries of problem solving components, to drive model-based knowledge acquisition, to allow semantic information retrieval and to structure collaborative decision-making processes.
Problem solving methods (PSMs) are also designed to support knowledge sharing and reuse. While ontologies capture a shared terminology, problem solving methods define generic algorithms, which can be applied to different tasks and domains. Problem solving methods and ontologies provide the two essential technologies which enable the development of knowledge-based applications by reuse.
Over the past ten years there has been significant progress in these two areas; libraries of ontologies and problem solving methods are now available, sophisticated architectures for application development by reuse have been proposed and powerful modelling languages exist for both ontologies and problem solving methods. Moreover, several success stories related to the use of ontologies and problem solving methods in real-world applications have been reported.
For all these achievements, several research issues are still open. In particular the take-up of these technologies remains relatively low while the cost associated with reuse is often too high for effective application development in many domains. The main aim of this workshop is then to bring together researchers and practitioners working on problem solving methods and ontologies, to assess the state of the art in these two areas and to identify mechanisms for increasing the accessibility and the feasibility of these technologies and for lowering the costs associated with reuse. We are especially interested in papers describing practical experiences, which suggest solutions to issues of scale (coping with large and complex problems) and usability (reducing the complexity of the reuse process with respect to various classes of users). We also welcome papers that address other aspects related to ontology/PSM development and use - see detailed list below. Ideally, all submissions will either target directly issues of cost and usability, or will consider these in the context of other relevant research questions.
We therefore invite authors to submit papers on topics including, but not limited to:
- Methodologies for developing and maintaining ontologies/PSMs.
- Languages for ontology/PSM specification.
- Tools to support ontology/PSM development, maintenance and use.
- Approaches to automated ontology extraction and instantiation.
- Use of ontologies to store, index, maintain and access shareable and
reusable components in information repositories, on or off the web.
- Distributed application development by selecting, configuring and adapting
shareable and reusable components.
- Tool support for constructing and maintaining libraries of shareable and
reusable components.
- Tools and intelligent agents supporting cost-effective application development
by reuse.
- Problem solving methods for information retrieval.
- Enriching archives of documents with ontology-based formalizations.
- Use of ontologies to structure negotiation, workflow processes and decision-making.
- Ontology development/instantiation by non-expert users.
- Ontology-driven model-based knowledge acquisition.
- Cost-effective PSM configuration and reuse.
- Relationships with OO standards.
- Integration of knowledge-level and symbol-level interoperability.
- Ontologies and Metadata, XML, RDF, etc..
| John Gennari | gennari@ics.uci.edu | ICS, University of California, Irvine, USA |
| Enrico Motta | e.motta@open.ac.uk | KMI, The Open University, UK |
| Mike Uschold | michael.f.uschold@boeing.com | Boeing, Seattle, USA |
For submission
instructions see the
main KA call.