Second call for papers: NMR sub-workshop on ontologies

Sincere apologies for multiple postings.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The NMR'2010 Workshop on

Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies

http://ksg.meraka.org.za/nmronto2010

Collocated With KR'2010

May 14-16 2010

Sutton Place, Toronto, Canada
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-- Workshop Description --

Classical reasoning over ontologies has reached the point where it can deal
with large real-world ontologies. This can largely be attributed to advances
in research on description logics (DLs). A good example is the medical
ontology SNOMED-CT, containing over 300,000 concepts and millions of binary
relationships between them. SNOMED-CT can be represented as a DL ontology,
and its subsumption hierarchy can be computed in a matter of minutes.

 The obvious next step now is to extend reasoning over ontologies to cover
non-classical cases, such as commonsense reasoning, a well established
branch of AI. The first steps in that direction have been done by the
ontology community, and while research along these lines has already
resulted in initial tangible results, there is a need for a more coherent
approach in order to speed up progress.

This need provides interesting challenges to both the ontology and
commonsense reasoning communities. For the commonsense reasoning community
it is a chance to determine to what extent techniques developed in its
sub-areas, like e.g. non-monotonic reasoning (NMR), can be tailored to the
requirements of the ontology community. For the ontology community it is an
opportunity to determine whether existing results in this area can be
sharpened and improved on by referring to results in the broader area of
commonsense reasoning.

The topic of the workshop will hence be combining commonsense reasoning
approaches and techniques with ontologies. One of the main motivations is to
bring ideas from the well developed area of non-monotonic reasoning, like
e.g. reasoning about actions, argumentation and belief revision, for
discussion in the realm of ontology engineering: evolution, debugging,
update, merging, etc. Certainly these tasks can benefit from most of the
advances in NMR and give new insights for research in that area as well.

Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies will be of interest
to:

  - Researchers in the ontology community, particularly DL researchers,
interested in extending ontological reasoning to non-classical cases.
  - Researchers in the knowledge representation and commonsense reasoning
community interested in applying existing NMR techniques to the area of
ontologies.

This workshop will focus on an emerging hot topic. As such, one of its
immediate outcomes will be boosting a new and exciting hybrid research
domain combining commonsense reasoning and knowledge engineering for
ontologies.



-- Topics of Interest --

Submissions are welcome on the role of commonsense and non-monotonic
reasoning for ontologies in areas that include but are not limited to the
following ones:

- Ontology Debugging and Update
- Ontology Merging, Alignment and Integration
- Inconsistency Handling
- Belief Revision and Theory Change for ontologies
- Uncertainty Handling, Defeasible Reasoning and Argumentation in ontologies
- Heuristic and Approximate Reasoning
- NMR methods for light-weight DL ontologies
- Planning and Reasoning about Action and Change on the Semantic Web
- Rules and Ontologies
- Temporal and Spatial Reasoning
- Ontology Fault Diagnosis and Repair
- Preferences and Ontologies
- Formal Concept Analysis and Ontologies


-- Submission Instructions --

Authors are kindly requested to follow the instructions for authors on the
NMR website at
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/news/conferences/NMR/2010/NMR_2010/Author_Instructions..html


Please submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nmronto2010


-- Important Dates

- Papers due: January 29 (Friday), 2010
- Notification: March 1 (Monday), 2010
- Final version: April 6 (Tuesday), 2010
- Workshop: May 14-16, 2010


-- Additional Information --

Please visit the NMR website at
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/news/conferences/NMR/2010/NMR_2010/NMR10.html

for more information about NMR, the venue of the workshop, the city of
Toronto, accommodation and travel tips.

-- Workshop Chairs --

- Ivan José Varzinczak (Meraka Institute, South Africa)
http://ksg.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak

- Renata Wassermann (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
http://www.ime.usp.br/~renata

-- Program Committee --

- Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory,
Greece)
- Fábio Cozman (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
- Giorgos Flouris (University of Crete and Information Systems Laboratory,
Greece)
- Norman Foo (University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Zhisheng Huang (Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
- Maurice Pagnucco (University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Jeff Pan (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)
- Bijan Parsia (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)
- Laurent Perrussel (Université de Toulouse 1, France)
- Guilin Qi (Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany)






-- 
Renata Wassermann
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
University of São Paulo