2nd CFP: AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges

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AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium
Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges
4-6 November 2011 . Arlington, Virginia USA

submission site open now. paper due by June 3, 2011
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The 2011 AAAI 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.


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

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 (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ogk2011). 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.
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

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

Program committee

* Hal Abelson, MIT, USA
* Quan Bai, CSIRO, Australia
* David Chadwick, Kent University, UK
* Vinay Chaudhri, SRI, USA
* Nick Gibbins, University of Southampton, UK
* Karthik Gomadam, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Stuart Graham, USPTO, USA
* Alon Halevy, Google, USA
* Andreas Harth, KIT, DE
* Michael Hausenblas, DERI Galway, Irland
* Sandro Hawke, W3C, USA
* Anupam Joshi, UMBC, USA
* David Karger, MIT, USA
* Gary Katz, MarkLogic, USA
* Qing Liu, CSIRO, Australia
* Ashok Malhotra, Oracle, USA
* Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA
* Theresa Pardo, SUNY Albany, USA
* Vassilios Peristeras, European Commission, Belgium
* Alexander Pretschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Alan Ruttenberg, SUNY Buffalo, USA
* Satya Sahoo, Case Western Reserve, USA
* Abdul Shaikh, NIH/NCI, USA
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, USA
* Joshua Tauberer, POPVOX, USA
* George Thomas, HHS, USA
* Curt Tilmes, NASA Goddard, USA
* Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research, USA
* David Wood, Talis, UK
* Peter Yeh, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Harlan Yu, Princeton, USA