CFP: AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges

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                                 Call For Papers
AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities 
and Challenges
                    4-6 November 2011  - Arlington, Virginia USA
                             http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011
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The AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI 
Opportunities and
Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public 
government data
as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research 
results and
shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems,
identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited.
Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, 
and the final
camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9, 2011.


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Background

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve 
government
transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by
publishing public government data online. Although industry and academia 
have used
these for some intriguing applications, the data in its present form is 
hard for
citizens to understand and use. Research and deployment challenges 
emerging from open
government data practices include the following.

* Scalability. How can we search, access and reuse the hundreds of 
thousands of
datasets from data.gov as well the much larger number of datasets 
directly available
at federal agencies' website? Is there an organic way to dramatically 
increase the
amount of open government data in a distributed and collaborative fashion?
* Interoperability. Multi-scale open government data came from city 
governments,
state governments, and national governments. How can one compare the GDP 
of the US
and China, and later link to state-level financial data? Open government 
data covers
many domains. How can one associate open government data with domain 
knowledge to
build, e.g. a cancer prevention application?
* Provenance and quality. How should provenance be leveraged to facilitate
high-quality data management interactions (e.g. reuse, mash-up and 
feedback) and
community participation between the government and the public?
* Citizen Involvement. How can linked data application sites encourage 
more citizen
participation for comments and contributions, and then how can these 
more diverse
contributions be tracked, managed, validated, and evaluated?

Several approaches have been proposed to address these challenges. Using 
semantic
technologies, especially Linked Data, to enrich the value of such data 
and ultimately
convey the data to the citizens is one possibility. For example, linking 
together
Justices' backgrounds, and related supreme court decisions has the 
potential to
provide a better understanding of the working of the Supreme Court. 
Linked Open
Government Data are enabled by Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, 
RDFS, SPARQL
and RDFa. Once linked, the value of government data can be greatly 
increased with a
potential reduction of cost (i) applications are no longer limited to 
one or several
datasets but can use all the inter-connected datasets (including 
non-government data)
on the Web; (ii) data-as-interface allow data curators, visualizers and 
analysts
incrementally work on a specific smaller part of data processing 
independently, (iii)
linked data enables transparent data mining and generates detailed 
provenance traces
that allow the study of trust, privacy and policy issues. Using 
crowd-sourcing to
distribute the task of building parsers and visualizers for different 
data.gov
datasets is another possibility. Machine learning to find and explore 
relationships
between data is also a possible approach.

Secondly, for governments to be able to release high quality datasets, 
they must be
able to express usage access and restriction policies. To achieve this, 
provenance
mechanisms must be provided to keep track of which datasets have been 
used and how
these have been combined and policy mechanisms must be used to ensure 
compliance with
appropriate usage restrictions. This involves several interesting areas 
of research:
machine understandable usage restrictions, provenance tracking and 
maintenance, and
scalable reasoners capable of verifying policy compliance.

Lastly, the techniques developed for extracting semantics, using, and 
sharing open
government datasets can also be applied to closed/secure datasets for 
applications
such as sharing private information within/across agencies, and integrating
electronic health records across healthcare organizations. In this 
symposium, we
invite input from diverse communities including but not limited to: 
government data
publishers, developers, user communities who run real systems and 
generate demand for
new technologies, and the AI community who can provide solutions and 
advance the
research in the areas specified above. The location of symposium is 
extremely
attractive since a lot of open government data practitioners are 
conveniently located
in Washington, DC.

Suggested Topics include but are not limited to the following

* Automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources
* General ontologies for open linked government data
* Entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources
* Adding temporal qualifications to government data
* Creating mash-ups with open government data
* Scalable solutions for linking open government data
* Linked open government data analysis
* Semantic technologies for government data and applications
* Representing and propagating provenance metadata
* Policies for information sharing, use, and privacy
* Managing usage restrictions and privacy of government data
* Metadata for certainty and trust in linked open government data
* Social networks in government data
* Publishing results of machine learning applied to open government data
* Visualization of open government data revealing underlying patterns 
and relations

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Symposium structure

This single track symposium will run from 9:00am Friday November 4 until 
12:30pm
Sunday November 6 and include a mixture of invited talks, paper 
presentations,
panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and discussions. We 
plan to have
several invited speakers, e.g., a US federal Government representative 
addressing the
current status of the US open government initiative, a researcher 
discussing open
challenges and a W3C staff member describing the role of current and 
future standards
in government knowledge. We will also have a panel to address the 
emerging issue of
health informatics, the potential nationwide health information network, 
where
private health data and public governmental data are interconnected. We 
are also
interested in running a half-day tutorial/hack-a-thon to provide 
attendees hands-on
experiences in creating Linked Open Government Data and building mashups.
Submissions

We invite submissions of full papers (up to eight pages) presenting 
research results
and short papers (up to four pages) defining a position, articulating a 
new problem
or describing a working system. Papers must be prepared in AAAI format 
and submitted
using the ogk2011 easychair site. All accepted papers will be published in a
proceedings issued as a AAAI technical report. Papers should be original 
material
that has not been previously published or under review for another 
venue. Late
breaking ideas are encouraged as the subject of a short papers.

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Important dates

* 3 June 2011 Submit papers using the ogk2011 site
* 15 July 2011 Notifications sent to authors
* 9 Sept 2011 Camera ready papers due
* 16 Sept 2011 author registration deadline
* 14 Oct 2011 Open pre-registration deadline
* 3 Nov 2011 AI Funding seminar
* 4-6 Nov 2011 Fall Symposium

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General symposium information

General information on the 2011 AAAI Fall Symposia will be available 
from the 2011
AAAI FSS Website. This includes information about deadlines, 
registration, location,
transportation, and hotel accommodations.
Organizers

* Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
* Tim Finin, UMBC
* Lalana Kagal, MIT
* Deborah McGuinness, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Program committee  (to be confirmed)

Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2011 09:54:54 UTC