KCAP-03 WORKSHOP

 

CAPTURING KNOWLEDGE FROM DOMAIN EXPERTS: PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS

 

To be linked with the Workshop on "Distributed & Collaborative Knowledge Capture" (Please also see their announcement)

 

 

A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the workshop goals and the technical issues that will be its focus:

 

In the early days of Expert Systems, knowledge engineers were given a very prominent role in interviewing domain experts and then formalising and implementing a knowledge base which captured what they thought an expert had said and/or how they had solved selected problems. This approach is both very expensive and open to many potential communication problems between the domain expert and the knowledge engineer. Role-limiting approaches took a substantial step forward, by viewing domain-level knowledge acquired from an expert by a knowledge acquisition tool as playing certain roles within a domain-independent problem solving method (PSM).

Today’s experts are avid computer users who can envision the potential of knowledge bases in their fields of expertise. This is clearly the case in many areas of science, where experts are eager and committed to undertake long-term knowledge capture and dissemination to improve their fields and benefit related ones. Many are already developing what can be considered skeletal ontologies and already using them to support relatively simple tasks. There is clear interest in moving towards more sophisticated knowledge bases that support complex problem solving activity.

One of the functions of this workshop is to have an in-depth look at the current state-of-the-art and in particular to see how the WWW has changed our thinking about these issues. The issue of whether it is necessary to superimpose a knowledge model on information acquired before it can be used to solve meaningful & novel tasks is one of the points of contention between this workshop & the one with which it is linked, namely, the "Distributed & Collaborative Knowledge Capture" workshop. Additionally, some groups of domain experts, who are now more computationally sophisticated, are asking for tools which will enable them to maintain collaboratively their own Knowledge Bases. Some of the problems of maintaining knowledge bases overlap with acquisition, others are quite distinct.

 

Clearly, this is a very inter-disciplinary activity and we very much hope that the contributions for the workshop will reflect this. These are some of the topics which we hope papers will address;

 

-         Systems which have been used by domain experts to develop KBs

-         Systems which have been used by domain experts to maintain KBs

-         Techniques to help domain experts visualise and debug their KBs

-         Detailed requirements from domain experts for the tools they would like to use when developing & maintaining KBs /Ontologies

-         Detailed case histories of the development of particular topic-specific KBs

etc

 

 

Workshop format:

 

-         There will be an opening Invited talk/position paper.

-         Where possible talks should include appropriate demos.

-         If there is a need we will also organize a longer demo/posters session.

-         We plan to have at least one panel - this will be with the Linked Workshop as the grand finale.

 

It is desirable that persons attending this workshop should also attend the linked workshop: "Distributed & Collaborative Knowledge Capture" as this is on a related topic & we are planning at least to have a joint panel as a Grand Finale for the 2 workshops.

 

 

          Co-chairs:                                               Derek Sleeman, Aberdeen, UK

                                                                   dsleeman@csd.abdn.ac.uk

 

                                                                   Yolanda Gil, ISI, USA

                                                                   gil@isi.edu

 

                  


 

          Members of the programme committee:

                  

Pete Clark, (Boeing, USA)

                    Martin Dzbor (OU, UK)

John Gennari (Washington, USA)

Midori Harris, (EBI, UK)

Mark Musen (Stanford, USA)         (tbc)

Kieron O'Hara (Southampton, UK)

Alan Rector (Manchester, UK)

                    Guus Schreiber (Amsterdam, Holland)   

 

Submissions

We invite short papers, limited to 8 pages, which describe ongoing work or new ideas within the scope of the workshop. Papers may also be in the form of a position statement, indicating a writer's particular opinion on a subject related to the workshop.


Submission procedure: Please email submissions, in PDF format only, to dsleeman@csd.abdn.ac.uk before 20th July (2003).
 
Submission format: Please use this Word template . This template is based on the official ACM templates for proceedings. In accordance with requirements of the ACM digital library, please include categories and subject descriptors that best describe your submission. The hierarchy of descriptors can be found here. You may include optional keywords. Note that reviewer assignments will be based on the contents of the abstract, as well as these descriptors and keywords. Accepted papers will be published as part of the KCAP 2003 workshop proceedings.

 

 

 

 

Timetable:

 

May 19, 2003: Publications of Call for Participation

 

July 19, 2003: Papers to be submitted to Chair of Workshop Committee, Derek Sleeman

 

August 19, 2003: Feedback to Authors on submitted papers

 

September 1, 2003: Publication of K-CAP 2003 workshop program

 

September 12, 2003: Revised papers to be submitted to Workshop Chair, Derek Sleeman

 

October 25-26, 2003: K-CAP 2003 workshops

 

 

 

 

Contributions & general queries should be sent to:

 

 

Derek Sleeman,

Department of Computing Science,

The University, ABERDEEN AB24 3FX

          Phone: +44 (0)1224 272296/88

          FAX +44 (0)1224 273422

          Email: dsleeman@csd.abdn.ac.uk