======================= CALL FOR PAPERS IR-KR2009 at IJCAI-09 July 11-13, 2009 Pasadena, CA, USA ======================= The IJCAI-09 Workshop on "Identity and Reference in web-based Knowledge Representation" (IR-KR2009) http://ir-kr.okkam.org/ July 11-13, 2009 Pasadena, California, USA held at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) http://ijcai-09.org -- IR-KR2009 goals -- The goal of this workshop, which in past years was mainly organised within the Web and Semantic Web (SW) communities (see past editions at WWW2006, WWW2007, ESWC200q8), is to widen debate on the impact and the challenges that the notions of *identity* and *reference* in web-oriented KR poses to some of the core concepts of AI. -- Background & Description of the workshop -- The Semantic Web initiative advances the idea that the web may become a space not only for publishing and interlinking documents (through HTML hyperlinks), but also knowledge bases (e.g. in the form of RDF graphs) in an open and fully decentralized environment. Even though models and languages used to implement the nascent Semantic Web have been taken from long-standing research in AI, SW and AI have different priorities. While traditionally a strong focus within AI has been developing theories and code to support sound and complete reasoning, web-oriented KR has a primary concern of web-wide information interoperability and integration. Perhaps the most central issue in reconciling these concernd is the Principle of Global Identifiers: "global naming leads to global network effects" (see Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, 2004, at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/). As for the web of documents, the overall value of such open and distributed network of truly interlinked knowledge sources, based on global names, would be immensely bigger than the sum of the value of the components. This central role of identity and reference for a web-scale KR poses new challenges to traditional KR, and many researchers have suggested that the concept of URI may deeply affect the notions of language (e.g. the semantics of using the "same" URI in different models), reference (e.g. rigid vs. non rigid designation), interpretation (e.g. the meaning of "links" across knowledge bases) & reasoning (e.g. distributed reasoning across theories) in traditional logic-based KR in AI. This workshop addresses these challenges. -- Expected outcome -- The anticipated outcome of the workshop is to assess the state of the art in the area of Identity and Reference in AI and the SW, and to go beyond the limited scope of the current Semantic Web, as well as to discuss and critically evaluate approach and next steps in implementing and reasoning about identity and reference. It is expected that the workshop will provide a valuable opportunity for cross-fertilization across different research communities. -- Workshop format -- Based on the successful experience in the past workshops on this topic, the format of IR-KR2009 will be the following: * a keynote talk that illustrates the importance of the topic * very short presentations of the accepted papers, to give participants an overview of the research work of the main workshop contributors * presentation of a detailed list of topics to discuss, by the workshop chair * extensive, moderated plenary discussion * collaborative write-up of conclusions and next steps -- Submissions -- The workshop aims at collecting contributions which can roughly be grouped as follows: * Foundations: formal and conceptual theories of identity and reference for web-oriented KR * Formal theories: semantics for KR on the web, soundness and completeness of web-oriented reasoning, semantics of interlinked data * Vision papers: visionary solutions to the problems of identity and reference in KR * Project papers: descriptions of research & development projects in this area * Experiences: contributions from research and industry that illustrate case studies or approaches to deal with the issues of identity and reference on a web-scale * Critical viewpoints: discussions of advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approaches We especially encourage contributions from groups or organizations which are working on assembling large knowledge-based data collections in order to compare the different practical solutions which were found for integrating semantic data from multiple sources. -- Submission Requirements and Dates -- IR-KR2009 will accept submissions for full papers, posters and demonstrations. The selection will be based on the significance and the quality of submissions as well as oriented towards fostering cross-pollination and discussions during the event. All selected abstracts will be included in the IJCAI-09 Working Notes. Authors are kindly requested to provide keywords upon submission. The format for submissions is the same as that of IJCAI-09. Please check http://ijcai-09.org for the style files. Submissions should be no longer than 5 pages. - Submission deadline (papers, posters, demos): March 6, 2009 - Notification to authors: April 17, 2009 - Camera-ready version: May 8, 2009 - Workshop dates: July 11-13, 2009 Submissions will be managed through EasyChair.org at: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=irkr2009 -- Attendance -- Following IJCAI-09 policy, the total number of participants in IR-KR2009 will be limited to 75 people. This includes organizers, PC members, invited speakers, authors and attendees. Authors will be selected based on the significance of their submission and will be preferred during registration to non-presenting attendees. Non-presenting attendees will be selected on a first-come-first-served basis. Please refer to http://ijcai-09.org for the application procedure and fees. -- Workshop Chair -- Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento [PRIMARY CONTACT] bouquet@disi.unitn.it -- Workshop Organizers -- Marko Grobelnik, IJS, Slovenia marko.grobelnik@ijs.si Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh hhalpin@ibiblio.org Frank van Harmelen. VU Amsterdam Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl Heiko Stoermer. University of Trento stoermer@dit.unitn.it Giovanni Tummarello. DERI Galway giovanni.tummarello@deri.org Michael Witbrock, Cycorp Inc witbrock@cycorp.eu -- Program Committee -- Confirmed members: Bo Andersson Karl Aberer Michael K. Bergman Dan Brickley Werner Ceusters Kendall Clark Richard Cyganiak Hugh Glaser Nicola Guarino Gregor Hackenbroich Tom Heath Alexander Löser Antonio Maña Larry Masinter Bijan Parsia Peter F. Patel-Schneider Valentina Presutti Marta Sabou Leo Sauermann Luciano Serafini Dagobert Soergel Andraz Tori Bernard Vatant