CfP: WoMO 2014 - 8th Int'l Workshop on Modular Ontologies

*Apologies for cross-posting*

========================================================
     8th Int'l Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO)
       Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 22, 2013
           held in conjunction with FOIS 2014

                 --- Call for Papers ---
========================================================
           Submission deadline: May 23, 2014
========================================================

http://womo2014.bio-lark.org

MODULARITY as studied for years in software engineering, is also central to formal and applied ontologies. Modularity supports reducing the complexity of ontologies and thereby easing the development, use and reuse, verification, maintenance, and integration of ontologies by humans and machines. 

The WoMO workshop series, now in its 8th edition, has helped to advance the understanding of modularity as it applies to ontologies. This year's workshop aims to go beyond ontologies and focuses on fostering knowledge exchange between other communities where modularity is or may become a critical factor, such as Big Data and Context. Big Data denotes collections of large, complex and heterogeneous datasets characterised by big volume, velocity and variety. The key research questions in this area revolve around the efficient management and use of this data, i.e., facets where modularized ontologies may lead to improved solutions. Context, on the other hand, is one of the most challenging problems faced in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Without considering contextual information, reasoning can easily run into problems such as: inconsistency, when considering knowledge in the wrong context; inefficiency, by considering knowledge irrelevant for a certain context; incompleteness, since an inference may depend on knowledge assumed in the context and not explicitly stated. Modular representations of knowledge, including modular ontologies, are one promising avenue for dealing with such context-related issues. 

WoMO 2014 continues the series of successful events that have been an excellent venue for practitioners and researchers to discuss latest work as well as work-in-progress. The most recent WoMOs were held at FOIS/ICBO 2012 and at LPNMR 2013. This time WoMO will be collocated with the Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2014), the leading conference in formal and applied ontology, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In addition to the foundational ontology-related topics, this year's workshop encourages submissions that discuss various topics on modularity in Big Data and Context, as well as vertical applications of modularity in particular domains such as Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, Biomedicine, Ambient Intelligence or Social Intelligence.

In general, topics include, but are not limited to:

* Foundational aspects of modularity: definition, representation, structure, design patterns, granularity;
* Logical aspects: modular (ontology) languages; reconciling inconsistencies across modules; formal structuring of modules; heterogeneity; hybrid theories; intertheory relations (conservativity, interpretability, strong equivalence, inseparability, etc.);
* Algorithmic & heuristic approaches: distributed and incremental reasoning; modularization and module extraction techniques; reasoning complexity; system descriptions;
* Methodological issues as they occur throughout the ontology lifecycle: publishing/sharing, linking, maintenance, reuse of modules;
* Analysis and evaluation: case studies or other analyses of modularizations; quantitative and qualitative ways to measure adequacy of a modularization; comparison of modularizations with respect to philosophical, logical, reasoning, cognitive, or social aspects;
* Modularity issues that arise in Big Data and Linked Data;
* Context-driven modularization and module-based contextual reasoning.

The workshop will be open to all attendants of FOIS'14 and its workshops. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission:  May 23, 2014
Notification:  June 30, 2014
Camera ready: July 20, 2014
Workshop: September 22, 2014

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

We welcome submissions on modularity in a broad sense. The workshop is open to papers of theoretical or practical nature from various disciplines. Submissions can be long papers (12 pages) or short papers (5 pages), formatted according the IOS formatting guidelines found at
	http://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/

All submissions must be prepared in PDF format and submitted no later than the submission deadline, through the EasyChair Submission Page at 
	http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=womo2014.

Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be made available in the proceedings to be published electronically in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series (see http://www.ceur-ws.org). The proceedings of WoMO 2012 and 2013 are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-875/ and http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1081/.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS:

Kenneth Baclawski, Northeastern University, Boston, USA
Tudor Groza, The University of Queensland, Australia
Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine, USA
Ivan Varzinczak, Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa


PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Stefano Borgo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Arina Britz, Meraka Institute, CSIR, South Africa
Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Mike Dean, Raytheon BBN Technologies, USA
Fred Freitas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada
Martin Homola, Comenius University of Bratislava, Slovakia
Robert Hoehndorf, University of Cambridge, UK
Ernesto Jiminez-Ruiz, University of Oxford, UK
Kouji Kozaki, Osaka University, Japan
Alessandra Mileo, DERI Galway, Ireland
Adrian Paschke, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
Guilin Qi, Southeast University, China
Thomas Schneider, University of Bremen, Germany
Marco Schorlemmer, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Spain
Luciano Serafini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Dimitry Tsarkov, University of Manchester, UK
George Vouros, University of Piraeus, Greece
Dirk Walther, TU Dresden, Germany
Kewen Wang, Griffith University, Australia


INVITED SPEAKERS: TBA

--
Ivan José Varzinczak
Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research - South Africa
Homepage: http://krr.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak

Received on Thursday, 3 April 2014 17:26:17 UTC