[DL] [CFP]The First International Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO 2006)

[Jie Bao]

The First International Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO 2006)
http://www.cild.iastate.edu/events/womo.html
International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006)
November 6, 2006, Athens, GA, USA

Workshop Description

Realizing the full potential of the Semantic web requires the
large-scale adoption and use of ontology-based approaches to sharing
of information and resources. Constructing large ontologies typically
requires collaboration among multiple individuals or groups with
expertise in specific areas, with each participant contributing only a
part of the ontology. Therefore, instead of a single, centralized
ontology, in most domains, there are multiple distributed ontologies
covering parts of the domain. Because no single ontology can meet the
needs of all users under every conceivable scenario, the ontology that
meets the needs of a user or a group of users needs to be assembled
from several independently developed ontology modules. Thus, in
realistic applications, it is often desirable to logically integrate
different ontologies, wholly or in part, into a single, reconciled
ontology. Ideally, one would expect the individual ontologies to be
developed as independently as possible from the rest, and the final
reconciliation to be seamless and free from unexpected results. This
would allow for the modular design of large ontologies and would
facilitate knowledge reuse. Few ontology development tools, however,
provide any support for integration, and there has been relatively
little study of the problem at a fundamental level. In order for the
full potential of the Semantic Web to be realized in practice, we need
to come to terms with the characteristics of web ontologies.
Specifically, next generation ontology languages and/or tools need to
support collaborative construction, selective sharing and use of
ontologies. In response to this need, there is a growing interest in,
on the one hand, logical formalisms that support ontology
modularization and the study of integration and segmentation problems
on the other.

Workshop Topics

Against this background, the proposed workshop aims to bring together
researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state of the art
and open research problems in ontology modularization and integration.
A secondary goal of the workshop is to facilitate collaborations
between different research groups. Specific topics of interest
include:

* Logical formalisms for Modular Ontologies
* Sharing and reuse of ontology modules - linking and importing approaches
* Identification and analysis of common scenarios for ontology
integration or modularization
* Methodologies for providing semantic guarantees on merged ontologies
* Methodologies for extracting semantically meaningful modules from
large ontologies
* Selective information sharing between ontology modules
* Syntax, semantics, and expressivity of modular ontology languages
* Features and limitations of DDLs, E-connections, and P-DLs
* Requirements of modular ontology languages
* Reasoning with modular ontologies
* Reconciling inconsistent ontology modules
* Approaches to distributed reasoning and their soundness,
completeness, efficiency
* Ontology language extensions to support modularity
* Modular ontology tools for collaborative ontology development
* Case studies, software tools, use cases, and applications
* Open problems

Workshop Format

The workshop will consist of:

* An opening session for introducing the workshop topics, goals,
participants, and expected outcomes
* A small number of invited talks carefully intermixed with
presentation of contributed papers. The invited talks will give
overviews of the main modular ontology language proposals, and of
logical approaches to ontology modularization/integration.
* Breaks between sessions, meant to encourage informal discussions
related to the topics discussed in the sessions and to create
opportunities for collaborations.
* Discussion of open problems and future research directions
* A wrap-up session summarizing the workshop (including formal or
informal discussions).

The workshop will allow enough time for presentations as well as
focused discussions among workshop participants.

Paper Submission

We invite papers that report on completed or work in progress on
relevant topic areas. All papers will be peer-reviewed by members of
the WoMO-2006 program committee. The contributions should be prepared
in PDF format according to the official formatting guidelines for
Springer-Verlag LNCS (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
Submissions should be limited to a maximum of 6 pages for short
papers, and 14 pages for full papers. Submissions in PDF form should
be emailed to womo06 at cs.iastate.edu, no later than July 17, 2006.

Extended versions of selected papers may be published in a special
issue of a journal or an edited book.

Important Dates

Submissions due: July 17, 2006

Notification of acceptance:   August 15, 2006

Camera-ready versions due: September 15, 2006

Workshop:                      November 6, 2006

Workshop Organizing Committee

Peter Haase, Institute AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe, haase at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/pha/

Vasant Honavar, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University,
honavar at cs.iastate.edu
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar

Oliver Kutz, School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester,
okutz at cs.man.ac.uk
http://ww.cs.man.ac.uk/~okutz

York Sure, Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe, sure at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/ysu/

Andrei Tamilin, University of Trento, andrei.tamilin at dit.unitn.it
http://dit.unitn.it/~tamilin/

Program Committee - TBA