Ontology Alignment Workshop and Evaluation at K-Cap 2005

Purpose

The increasing number of methods available for schema matching/ontology 
integration suggests the need to establish a consensus for evaluation of 
these methods. There is now a coordinated international initiative to 
forge this consensus. After the two events organized in 2004 (namely, 
the Information Interpretation and Integration Conference (I3CON) and 
the EON Ontology Alignment Contest), this year we organize one unique 
evaluation of which the outcome will be presented at the Workshop on 
Integrating Ontologies held in conjunction with K-CAP 2005 at Banff 
(Canada) on October 2, 2005.

The goal of the ontology alignment initiative is to provide ground to 
discuss alignment and matching algorithms and system performances and to 
help as much as possible their improvements.

Campaign description

This year's campaign will consist of three parts: it will feature two 
real world blind tests (anatomy and directory) and a systematic 
benchmark test suite. By blind tests it is meant the result expected 
from the test is not known in advance. The evaluation organisers provide 
the participants with the pairs of ontologies to align as well as (in 
the case of the systematic benchmark suite only) expected results. The 
ontologies are described in OWL-DL and serialized in the RDF/XML format. 
The expected alignments are provided in a standard format expressed in 
RDF/XML and described in http://co4.inrialpes.fr/align/.

The anatomy real world case will have to be tested blindly. It covers 
the domain of body anatomy and will consist of two ontologies with an 
approximate size of several 10k classes and several dozen of relations.

The directory real world case will have to be tested blindly. It consist 
of alignming web sites directory (like open directory or Yahoo's).

Like for last year's EON contest, a systematic benchmark series has been 
produced. The goal of this benchmark series is to identify the areas in 
which each alignment algorithm is strong and weak. The test is based on 
one particular ontology dedicated to the very narrow domain of 
bibliography and a number of alternative ontologies of the same domain 
for which alignments are provided.

 From the results of the experiments the participants are expected to 
provide the organisers with a paper to be published in the workshop 
proceedings.

The results from both, the participants and the organizers, will be 
presented at the Workshop on Integrating Ontologies at K-CAP 2005 taking 
place at Banff (Canada) on October, 2nd 2005. We hope to see you there.

Timeline

First publication of test cases: June 10th, 2005.
Comments due: anytime before July 1st, 2005
Final publication of test cases: July 4th, 2005.
Preliminary results due: August 15th, 2005.
Camera ready copies: September 2nd, 2005.
Workshop : October 2nd, 2005.

Steering Committee

Benjamin Ashpole (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab.)
Marc Ehrig (University of Karlsruhe)
Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA Rhône-Alpes)
Lewis Hart (Applied Minds)
Todd Hughes (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs)
Natasha Noy (Stanford University)
Heiner Stuckenschmidt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Petko Valtchev (Université de Montréal, DIRO)
Contact

Contact addresses are heiner (à) cs . vu . nl and Jerome . Euzenat (à) 
inrialpes . fr


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            K-Cap Workshop on Integrating Ontologies
                October 2, 2005 in Banff, Canada
                        Call for Papers

         http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/intont2005

Objectives

The Integrating Ontologies workshop will bring together researchers and 
application developers from the area of ontology software 
interoperability. Its goal is to promote the exchange of knowledge, 
ideas, and future challenges for handling multiple competing ontologies. 
The workshop will facilitate methodological and technical discussions.
For many domains, a variety of ontologies have been engineered, learned, 
and extended. Each is an interface for a similar purpose yet uses 
different nomenclatures. To enable collaboration within and across 
application domains, software agents require transparency between the 
various formalisms. This requires both semantic alignment and 
syntactical translation. Purely manual approaches are error-prone, 
onerous, and insufficient to support the vision of dynamic systems 
interoperability. However, recent research in data model alignment 
exploits "meaning" that is explicit and implicit in ontologies and 
schemas. Consequently, if heterogeneity can be mitigated with minimal 
use of standards by way of partially or fully automated alignment, then 
the interoperability of and for commercial, non-profit, military, and 
government systems will be simplified and improved. This workshop will 
exhibit new approaches to alignment, translation, and other methods that 
promise to help fulfil the vision of the Semantic Web.

Organization

The one-day workshop will consist of the three components:
- Research presentations will feature the latest efforts for ontology 
alignment and mapping described in reviewed papers;
- Tool demonstrations will display alignment-empowered tools in action;
- Ontology alignment contest results will be presented.  The contest 
will benchmark tools against prearranged ontology pairs.  Some pairs 
will be synthesized by the organizers of this workshop and some will be 
taken from the real world.  Collectively, they will challenge the limits 
of the alignment algorithms. A separate call will be issued for the contest.

Topics

The main topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- ontology/schema alignment and matching
- ontology/schema mapping and transformation
- ontology/schema merging and integration
- ontology/schema mediation and reconciliation
- reuse of knowledge from disparate sources (text, user input, etc.) for 
ontology alignment
- automatic and semi-automatic approaches
- mapping languages
- applications for and tools based on alignment
- integration within larger applications
- evaluation approaches
- translation of information between heterogeneous sources

Dates

Paper submission deadline: July 15, 2005
Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2005
Camera ready deadline: September 2, 2005
Workshop: October 2, 2005

Submission

Interested authors should submit an electronic PDF version of their 
papers to Marc Ehrig (email: ehrig-at-aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de) prior to 
the submission deadline. The first page of submitted papers should 
include: title, author names, affiliations, and electronic mail 
addresses for all authors. Full-paper submissions should not exceed 
eight pages, including title page and abstract. Alternatively, people 
can submit a two-page short paper describing the technology they would 
like to demonstrate, or a two-page position paper on current ongoing 
research. Papers should be formatted according to the guidelines of the 
main conference (http://www.kcap05.org/).

Organizing Committee

Benjamin Ashpole, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab
Marc Ehrig (main contact), University of Karlsruhe
Jérôme Euzenat, INRIA Rhône-Alpes
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Program Committee

Dean Allemang (TopQuadrant Inc.)
Jos de Bruijn (DERI Innsbruck)
Oscar Corcho (Univesity of Manchester)
Christine Golbreich (University Rennes 1)
Lewis Hart (Applied Minds)
Todd Hughes (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs)
Ryutaro Ichise (NII, Tokyo)
Yannis Kalfoglou (University of Southampton)
Deborah McGuinness (Stanford University)
Natasha Noy (Stanford University)
Amit Sheth (University of Georgia and Semagix)
Pavel Shvaiko (University of Trento)
Michael Sintek (DFKI, Kaiserslautern)
Umberto Straccia (CNR)
York Sure (University of Karlsruhe)
Mike Uschold (Boeing Corp.)
Petko Valtchev (DIRO, Université de Montréal)

Contact address for the workshop is ehrig -at- aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de

-- 
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Marc Ehrig
Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe
phone:   +49-(0)721-608-8941
e-mail: ehrig@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
address: 76128 Karlsruhe (Germany)
www:    http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/
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Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2005 07:58:23 UTC