CfP: Workshop "Intelligent Information Integration" during ECAI'98

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                         CALL FOR PAPERS

           International and Interdisciplinary Workshop 

              "INTELLIGENT INFORMATION INTEGRATION"

               http://www.tzi.org/grp/i3/ws-ecai98

                          25 August 1998
                            during the 
        European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'98),
                  Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK

		Submission Deadline: 27 March 1998

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Technical Description
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Due to Intranets and Internets, more and more information sources
become technically available. These include knowledge bases, data
bases, and semi-structured data (e.g. HTML pages). An increasing
number of users now either wishes to integrate these different
information sources or to have a uniform view of these. As a
consequence, the integration of heterogeneous information sources has
become a field of investigation of growing importance.

The schematic and semantic heterogeneity is one of the difficulties in
the integration of heterogeneous knowledge and data bases. Normally,
the information in every information source is stored with regards to
their users' requirements (e.g. an application), disregarding access
from other sites or their integration. Semantically similar
information thus may be stored with different structures (e.g. a name
may be stored either as one string or as two strings split into first
name and last name) and different information representations
(e.g. ranking values can be represented either as numbers or as
symbols).

There are several distinct research and development areas explicitly
or implicitly addressing semantic heterogeneity. Most approaches
reconcile the semantic conflict implicitly. Federated databases, for
example, integrate local databases into one (virtual) global database
while at the same time preserving the autonomy of each local
database. In loosely-coupled systems like multi-databases query
languages are extended to access different information
systems. However, they do not help the user with the heterogeneity
problem. Other groups want to exchange knowledge and data via
standards (e.g. KIF, STEP, etc), but the different semantics of the
standard and the information source have to be correlated. Other
approaches take the semantics of knowledge or data more closely into
account and represent the semantics explicitly.  In the DARPA
"Intelligent Information Integration" initiative approaches
are developed which represent the meaning in ontologies or meta data
in contexts. The ontologies may be used to reconcile the conflicts or
act as a global domain specification. However, there is still a great
number of disciplines whose subtask is at least the integration of
information.

Although each research and development community has its own view of
the integration of information sources the basic problems concerning
for example the semantic and schematic heterogeneity remain the
same. It is an interesting aspect that different groups tackle the
problem in different ways. It is the aim of this workshop to bring
together these heterogeneous groups in order to create a forum where
the participants can compare their individual approaches.


Theme
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The interdisciplinary workshop of "Intelligent Information
Integration" covers all topics related to the integration of
heterogeneous data, information and knowledge sources. The workshop
will bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners and
discuss further research and development directions in intelligent
integration of information. Topics of interest include, but are not
limited to:

 - wrappers and mediators
 - integration approaches using ontologies/contexts
 - design principles for ontologies used for integration 
 - languages for information integration 
 - advanced integration architectures 
 - semantic, schematic, vocabulary, data heterogeneity 
 - information sources in Internet, Intranet 
 - classification schemes (for mediators, semantic heterogeneity, etc.)
 - tools for supporting information integration 
 - reviews and evaluation of existing integration approaches 
 - practical experience with integration approaches 
 - theoretical perspectives of information integrations 
 - ontology mapping, ontology algebras and context logic 
 - intelligent information retrieval 
 - security aspects 
 - change management 
 - federated databases and multi-databases 
 - integration of uncertain or inaccurate sources


Submission Procedure
--------------------

Authors are invited to submit original research contributions or
experience reports in English. Submitted papers must be unpublished
and substantially different from papers under review. Papers that have
been or will be presented at small workshops/symposia whose
proceedings are available only to the attendees may be submitted.

Papers should be double-spaced and no longer than 12 pages. As text
formats only LaTex or Microsoft Word 6.0 (or higher) are
accepted. Papers should be sent electronically not later than March
27. 1998 to

  Holger Wache <wache@tzi.org>

Authors that cannot submit Papers electronically should please send 5
hard-copies to the following address:

  Holger Wache 
  Bereich Intelligente Systeme
  Technologie-Zentrum Informatik (TZI) - FB3
  Universitaet Bremen
  Postfach 330440 
  D-28334 Bremen
  GERMANY

Papers received after the deadline or not conforming to the submission
format will be rejected without review. Papers will be selected on the
basis of review of full paper contributions.

We propose to publish the contributions in public report series of
University of Bremen ("Lila Reihe") and via WWW. The
format guidelines for the final paper version will be published at
this place.  Final camera-ready copies of accepted papers will be due
by June 01 1998.

Please note, we are preparing a special issue in a journal concerning
the workshop topic. Selected papers will be invited to contribute a
revised and extended version in that special issue.


Important Dates
---------------

  Deadline for papers:           March 27, 1998 
  Notification of acceptance:    May 01, 1998 
  Camera-ready copies of papers: June 01, 1998
  Workshop on ECAI-98:           August 25, 1998 


Organizing Committee
--------------------

This workshop will be organized by the following people:

 o Oliver Duschka
 o Dieter Fensel
 o Maurizio Lenzerini
 o Marie-Christine Rousset
 o Holger Wache (contact)


Program Committee
-----------------

 o Franz Baader (RWTH Aachen, Germany),
 o Stefan Conrad (University of Magdeburg, Germany),
 o Adam Faquar (Stanford University, USA),
 o Enrico Franconi (IRST, Italy),
 o James Hendler (University of Maryland, USA),
 o Manfred Jeusfeld (KUB Tilburg University, The Netherlands),
 o Craig A. Knoblock (University of Southern California, USA),
 o Alon Y. Levy (University of Washington, USA),
 o Eduardo Mena (University of the Basque Country, Spain),
 o Robert Meersman (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium),
 o Werner Nutt (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel),
 o Mike Papazoglou (KUB Tilburg University, The Netherlands),
 o John Sowa (Binghamton University, USA)

Received on Monday, 2 February 1998 09:26:47 UTC