Special Session on “Ontologies: from theory to applications”

Call for Papers

  1. Scope
  2. Topics
  3. Paper Submission
  4. Organizers

Scope

The term Ontology comes from Philosophy, which defines it as the study of part-of relationships and entity dependencies. Ontology as a science analyzes the features of possible things, and the categories in which they can be included. In the Knowledge Engineering research area, there is now a consensus of opinion that an ontology is a rigorous and exhaustive conceptual schema focused on a certain domain, represented in a logic-based language, and designed to facilitate information communication and reuse among different computational systems and organizations.

In the last decade, ontologies have been raised to become one of the most used formalisms for the representation of knowledge in modern Intelligent Systems, and have been proposed for the support of metadata management in the Semantic Web. The current standard language for ontology representation is OWL 2, which has strong underpinnings in Description Logics (DLs), a family of logics to represent structured knowledge. Currently, research on ontologies is focused on:

  • Studying the theoretical foundations of ontologies, their limitations, and prospective extensions, with a particular focus on their semantics, reasoning procedures, and complexity.
  • Developing knowledge management frameworks to support ontology-based systems: representation languages, inference engines, software tools, etc.
  • Implementing practical applications that rely on them.

The objective of this special session is to bring together international researchers interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of ontologies, and to encourage discussions aimed to bring the gap between fundamental and applied research. The session is open to contributions generated by researchers from different areas in order to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and cross-fertilization. It will also serve as a forum to exchange research experiences and foster future collaboration between the groups.

Topics

Theory. Fundamentals of ontology-based knowledge representations and their relation with other formalisms, including:

  • Representation Languages: OWL 2, RDF(S), etc.
  • Query Languages
  • Rules & Rule Languages
  • Reasoning: Algorithms, Complexity and Tools
  • Contextualization, Summarization and Ranking
  • Uncertainty and Imprecision in Ontologies
  • Data Visualization
  • Best Practices and Modeling Patterns
  • Relational Models and Ontologies
  • Linked Data, Web 2.0 and Folksonomies
  • Ontology Learning

Technologies. General technologies and tools aimed at supporting the development of ontology-based intelligent systems, including:

  • Ontology-based Frameworks and Platforms
  • Multi-Agent Systems and Ontologies
  • Semantic Web Services
  • Large Systems Performance and Scalability
  • APIs, Plug-ins and Development Tools
  • Mash-ups and Semantically-Enriched Applications
  • Multilingual Ontologies and Localization

Applications: Experiences in the development and use of ontologies in specific application domains, including:

  • Domain-Specific Ontologies: Environmental, Medical, Legal, etc.
  • Ontology-based Systems in:
    • Ambient Intelligence
    • Health Care
    • Environment
    • Natural Language Processing & Text Processing
    • Information Fusion
    • etc.

Paper Submission

All papers are to be submitted electronically through the ISDA 2011 website. Authors should carefully follow the instructions given there. Submitted papers will be peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers.

Organizers

  • Fernando Bobillo: fbobillo@unizar.es
    Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, University of Zaragoza, Spain
  • Juan Gómez-Romero: jgromero@inf.uc3m.es
    Applied Artificial Intelligence Group, Department of Computer Science, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain