Call for Papers - Fourth International Workshop on Definitions in Ontologies (IWOOD 2016)

Fourth International Workshop on Definitions in Ontologies (IWOOD 2016)

CALL FOR PAPERS

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Held in conjunction with the International Conference on Biological 
Ontologies (ICBO 2016) in Corvallis, Oregon, from August 1 to 4, 2016.

Website: http://sites.google.com/site/defsinontos2016/home

Definitions of terms in ontologies serve a number of purposes. For 
example, logical definitions allow reasoners to assist in and verify 
classification, lessening the development burden and enabling expressive 
query. Natural language definitions can help ameliorate low 
inter-annotator agreement. Good definitions allow for non-experts and 
experts in adjacent disciplines to understand unfamiliar terms making it 
possible to confidently use terms in external ontologies, facilitating 
data integration.

The goals of this workshop are:
-to engage participants in discussing what are well-constructed textual 
and logical definitions;
-to disseminate methodological solutions to textual and logical 
definition writing and generation;
-to introduce tools to assist in definition creation;
-to bring together interested researchers and developers to explore 
issues relating to definitions and enable cross-fertilization leading to 
new approaches;
-to share case studies that expose difficulties arising in definition 
construction, evaluation, interpretation, and revision;
-to disseminate strategies of evaluation of definitions by readers from 
different domains in order to reveal potential difficulties in 
interpretation;
-to disseminate practices for participants to bring back to their 
projects that will improve the quality of their ontologies;
-to provide an opportunity for interaction and collaboration with 
experts on definitional practices;
-to provide a platform for ontology developers to initiate 
cross-ontology collaborations for definition-related matters.

TOPICS
Paper topics include but are not limited to:
-Experiences in formulating definitions;
-Tools that assist in definition editing or creation, including 
collaborative systems;
-Coordination of logical and textual definitions;
-Validation and quality control of definitions;
-Methods for constructing definitions from multiple sources;
-Use of controlled languages such as Rabbit or ACE for more 
user-friendly logical definition creation;
-Use of templates to systematize definition creation;
-Technical issues encountered in definition creation, checking, or 
revision;
-Techniques or studies evaluating definitions;
-Adaptation of definitions for different audiences.

FORMAT AND OUTCOMES
The workshop will consist of case-based presentations on strategies, 
methodologies, and tools for writing, evaluating, and revising textual 
and logical definitions in ontologies. Presentations will be followed by 
extensive discussions on the presented strategy and use cases. The 
organizers will facilitate interactivity by providing collective 
exercises on definition creation, evaluation, and revision in relation 
to the speakers’ presentations. The audience will also be invited to 
submit use-cases and examples that have presented difficulty, which will 
then be discussed in an open format.

The workshop will document findings on the workshop website: 
http://sites.google.com/site/defsinontos2016/home. Contributions will be 
published in the ICBO Proceedings.

INTENDED AUDIENCES
The intended audiences for this workshop are:
-Ontologists, tool developers, and domain experts whose work encounters 
issues regarding definitions;
-Tool developers building definition- or ontology-authoring tools;
-Philosophers and logicians;
-Terminologists and lexicologists working on definitions and their 
modeling;
-Biomedical researchers working on definitions in nomenclatures such as 
SNOMED;
-Computer scientists addressing these issues in languages like OWL;
-NLP researchers working on definition extraction, generation, or 
checking;
-NLP/IR researchers reusing definitions produced for ontologies.

SUBMISSIONS
All papers should include one or more case studies and address specific 
issues related to definitions, ideally demonstrating a link to a 
biological or biomedical domain, or the general theme of the conference: 
"Food, Nutrition, Health and Environment for the 9 billion".

All papers should be between 4 and 8 pages, excluding references, 
formatted using the ICBO MS Word templates found 
at: http://icbo.cgrb.oregonstate.edu/ICBO_submission. The workshop 
language is English. Papers are to be submitted using EasyChair 
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwood2016).

IMPORTANT DATES
-Workshop Paper Submission Deadline: April 25, 2016
-Notification of Paper Acceptance: June 15, 2016
-Camera-Ready Copies Submission Deadline: July 1, 2016
-Workshops: August 1-4, 2016

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Selja Seppälä (University at Buffalo, USA)
Amanda Hicks (University of Florida, USA)
Mark Jensen (University at Buffalo, USA)
Patrick Ray (University at Buffalo, USA)
Alan Ruttenberg (University at Buffalo, USA)
Daniel R. Schlegel (University at Buffalo, USA)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (see updates on the website)
Mauricio Almeida (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
Pamela Faber (Universidad de Granada, Spain)
Natalia Grabar (Université de Lille 3, France)
Mustafa Jarrar (Birzeit University, Palestine)
Marie-Claude L'Homme (Université de Montréal, Canada)

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2016 09:04:54 UTC