CFP: Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution

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International Workshop on Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution

- https://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/esoe2007

- In conjunction with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2007
- November 12th, 2007
- Busan, Korea
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Objectives
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The Semantic Web and collaborative tagging are two complementary approaches aiming at making information search, retrieval, navigation and knowledge discovery easier. While the Semantic Web enforces semantics top-down via the use of ontologies, collaborative tagging tries to obtain semantics in a bottom-up fashion. Del.icio.us and flickr are success stories of collaborative tagging; the winners of the Semantic Web Challenge demonstrate the success of the Semantic Web. Still, both approaches face open issues. For the Semantic Web, ontology engineering, in particular, large-scale ontology construction, has been a bottleneck. While effort and progress have been made in ontology matching, alignment, versioning and learning, it has become clear that constructing large ontologies requires collaboration among multiple individuals or groups with expertise in specific areas. Also critical is the ontology evolution in the open, dynamic Web environment in order to keep pace with the Web
 dynamics. For collaborative tagging, tags (metadata) can be generated in large-scale and capture users' collective wisdom. However, large-scale tagging usually degrades the performance of re-findability due to the ambiguity of uncontrolled vocabulary and the flat structure of "tag soup". In such a case tagging alone is not helpful at all for solving the problem. Bundles, classification, relations or tagging of tags are some promising ways to enforce some kinds of structure for tags in order to enable scalability and findability.
 
There is a growing interest in marrying the two paradigms in order to create large-scale semantic and intelligent content. The basic idea is to 1) derive emergent semantics from community-based collaborative interaction as demonstrated by Web 2.0 application, in particular, folksonomic tagging; 2) extract and formally model emergent semantics in structures, such as ontologies; 3) construct and evolve ontologies as emergent semantics from collaborative applications are of dynamic nature; and 4) enhance collaborative applications with formal ontological structures. Against this background, the proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the relevant fields of the Semantic Web, ontology engineering, folksonomy, social Web, artificial intelligence, machine learning, information integration and relevant application areas (e.g., bioinformatics, enterprise knowledge management, e-science, e-government, medical informatics, social informatics, among othe
rs) to discuss the current state of the art and open research problems in emergent semantics and ontology evolution. A secondary goal of the workshop is to facilitate collaborations between different research groups.
 

Topics of Interest
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Workshop Topics include (but are not limited to):
 
Emergent semantics analysis
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    * Characterization and analysis of Web 2.0 applications
    * Tagging behavior analysis for online communities
    * Dynamic context modeling
    * Formal foundations and frameworks for emergent semantics
    * Semantic disambiguation and merging
    * Emergent semantic acquisition tools and environments
 
Emergent semantics modeling - ontologies
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    * Emergent semantic extraction approaches and algorithms such as semiotic, algebraic, logic and statistical methods
    * Collaborative ontology construction
    * Ontology self-organisation
    * Semantic similarity and reasoning
 
Ontology Evolution
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    * Ontology dynamics - change management
    * Ontology learning from collaborative tagging
    * Ontology adaptability and optimization
    * Ontology aggregation and linking
 
Technologies, tools and proof-of-concept applications
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    * Semantic tagging
    * Experiment study
    * Tag recommendation mechanisms
    * Large scale semantic content management
    * Infrastructures and technologies
    * Systems and applications
    * Open problems
 
As well as papers arising directly from the above areas, we also welcome contributions from related disciplines which may contribute to the success of emergent semantics and ontology evolution, including natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, other applications of Web 2.0, such as blogs, wikis, etc.
 
The workshop encourages participation from both academia and industry with its emphasis on theoretical and practical aspects of emergent semantics and ontology evolution. Given its novelty and infancy, we expect academic participants to present their theoretical algorithms, approaches, initial experiment results and/or work on progress. On the other hand, we expect representatives from industry to present business cases, their requirements and insights for emergent semantic and ontology evolution.
 

Program
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The workshop will consist of:
    * An opening session for introducing the workshop topics, goals, participants, and expected outcomes
    * Two invited talks from academia and industry respectively, carefully intermixed with presentation of contributed papers.
    * Technical presentation.
    * Discussion of open problems and future research directions
    * A wrap-up session summarizing the workshop (including formal or informal)
 

Workshop Organising Committee
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    * Peter Haase, Institute AIFB at University of Karlsruhe (DE). email: haase [at] aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
    * Andreas Hotho, KDE Group at University of Kassel (DE). email: hotho [at] cs.uni-kassel.de
    * Luke Chen, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, UK. email: l.chen [at] ulster.ac.uk
    * Ernie Ong, SAP CEC Research Centre, Belfast, UK. email: ernie.ong [at] sap.com
    * Philippe Cudre Mauroux, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne. email: philippe.cudre-mauroux [at] epfl.ch
 

Program Committee
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    * Andreas Abecker, FZI, Germany
    * Karl Aberer, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland
    * Harith Alani, University of Southampton, UK
    * Ciro Cattuto, University of Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
    * Stefan Decker, DERI, Galway, Ireland
    * Manfred Hauswirth, DERI, Galway, Ireland
    * Peter Mika, Yahoo, Barcelona, Spain
    * Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA
    * Daniel Oberle, SAP Research Karlsruhe, Germany
    * Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz, Germany
    * Ljiljana Stojanovic, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
    * Leo Sauermann, DFKI, Germany
    * Harald Sack, University of Jena, Germany
    * Marta Souba, Knowledge Media Institute, UK
    * Luc Steels, Free University of Brussels (VUB), Belgium
    * Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
 

Submissions
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We invite two types of submissions for this workshop: Technical Papers and Short Position Papers. Papers can report on completed or work in progress in any of the topics of interests of the workshop (but not limited to them), including use-cases and descriptions of demonstrations.
Format requirements for submissions of papers are:
 
    * Maximum 12 pages, excluding title page and bibliography for technical papers.
    * Maximum 6 pages, excluding title page and bibliography for short position papers.
    * All submissions should be formatted according to the formatting guidelines for Springer-Verlag (LNCS) - see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
    * All papers must be submitted in PDF format.
    * All submissions must be entered into the Workshop Submission System.
 
Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed and selected on the basis of these reviews.
Accepted papers will be published in a hardcopy Workshop Proceedings and online. Selected high-quality papers will be recommended for publication in an international journal. Authors of accepted papers need to register for the main conference and present the paper at the workshop.
 

Important Dates
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    * ==> Abstract submissions: July 23, 2007
    * ==> Submissions due: July 30, 2007
    * Notification of acceptance: 30 August, 2007
    * Camera-ready versions due: 15 September, 2007
    * Workshop: 12 November, 2007

Received on Wednesday, 20 June 2007 18:01:33 UTC