[DL] CFP: K-Cap 05 workshop on Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking, and Segmentation

[Harith Alani]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

 Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking, and Segmentation 

      K-Cap 2005 Workshop - Sunday, October 2, 2005 at Banff, Canada
                
                http://www.aktors.org/ontoman05/

                
Objectives
----------
Ontologies are a cornerstone of the Semantic Web, and are probably the most
important form of knowledge representation currently used in both Artificial
Intelligence and on the Semantic Web. Building the required ontologies
represents a major challenge both because of the complexity of each
knowledge domain and because of the sheer number of ontologies the Semantic
Web will require. It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to
construct a single ontology, and even more if the engineer lacks first hand
knowledge of the domain they are trying to represent. However, one of the
original motivations and supposed advantages of ontologies is that they
facilitate "knowledge reuse". In theory, existing ontologies constructed by
third parties could be reused, modified, extended and pruned as required,
thereby avoiding the considerable effort of starting from scratch. To
achieve this level of reuse, however, an appropriate infrastructure of tools
and methods must be made available to allow the search, selection and
general management of the existing resources. 

Ontology search systems permit the identification from the plethora of web
resources of only those items which are proper ontologies. Ontology ranking
involves the ranking of the retrieved entities in accordance with a number
of criteria, including the presence and absence of certain terms, and their
position in the ontology. Ontology segmentation involves the ability to
select and extract a particular sub-section of an existing ontology for the
current needs. In order to facilitate these procedures, ontology
visualisation and editing are necessary. 

This workshop will encourage the presentation and exploration of solutions
to key aspects of ontology management and it is expected to stimulate
further research in these important issues. This workshop intends to bring
together researchers and practitioners from a wide area of research, such as
semantic web, knowledge management, information retrieval, to discuss the
issues above and exchange knowledge and experience. 

Topics of Interest
------------------
Includes but not limited to: 

- Ontology search engines 
- User interfaces for searching ontologies 
- Ontology reuse 
- Ontology ranking 
- Ontology partitioning 
- Ontology task-based evaluation 
- Ontology change management 
- Ontology versioning 
- Ontology merging, mapping and reconciliation 
- Ontology selection using visualisation 

Organisers
----------
- Harith Alani (University of Southampton, UK) ha at ecs.soton.ac.uk 
- Christopher Brewster (University of Sheffield, UK)
C.Brewster at dcs.shef.ac.uk 
- Natasha Noy   (Stanford Medical Informatics, USA) noy at smi.stanford.edu
- Derek Sleeman (University of Aberdeen, UK) sleeman at csd.abdn.ac.uk 

Programme Committee
-------------------
- Srinandan Dasmahapatra (University of Southampton, UK) 
- Mark Musen (Stanford Medical Informatics, USA) 
- Sofia Pinto (Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, Portugal) 
- Alun Preece (University of Aberdeen, UK) 
- Alan Rector (University of Manchester, UK) 
- Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton, UK) 
- Steffen Staab (University of Koblenz, Germany) 
- York Sure (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) 
- Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK) 

Submissions
-----------
We welcome the submission of full papers (up to 8 pages) describing some
ongoing work relevant to this workshop's topics of interest, and short
papers (up to 4 pages) for position statements and new ideas. Papers must be
formatted using the K-CAP 2005 formatting guidelines on the conference
website (http://www.kcap05.org/). Please email your submissions in PDF to
ha at ecs.soton.ac.uk, no later than 11:59pm 11th July 2005. 

Dates
-----
Submissions due: July 11, 2005
Notification: August 8, 2005 
Camera ready copy: September 5, 2005 
Workshop: October 2, 2005 

Dr Harith Alani 
Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia 
Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ha