Call for Papers

                         International Workshop on
     Ontological Engineering on the Global Information Infrastructure

   To be held in conjunction with the 11th Workshop on
              Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management
                  May 25, 1999, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany.

    http://www.swi.psy.uva.nl/usr/richard/workshops/ka2-99/ka2-cfp.html

 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ontologies have come to play an increasingly important role in
Information Technology. Originally they were applied in the Knowledge
Engineering community to model domain knowledge for enabling knowledge
sharing and reuse. An ontology was defined as a formal explicit
representation of a conceptualization (of some phenomenon in the
world). Later on, emphasis has been put on consensus on the content of
ontologies, in the sense that a group of people agrees on the concepts
and relations in the ontology.  This promoted sharing and
communication of knowledge within a particular group, and it is
therefore no surprise that ontologies have become popular instruments
in Knowledge Management where they can fill roles like corporate
memories, enterprise knowledge maps, and organizational memories.

With the growing omni-presence of the global information
infrastructure, ontologies have found yet another interesting
application. The WWW is growing so quickly that it has become very
hard to find the nuggets you are looking for. We face the problem of
information overload. It turns out that ontologies form good
candidates for meta-data, which opens the way to more intelligent
search on the WWW (as opposed to keyword-based search).

There are many open issues in ontological engineering. This workshop
aims to investigate two of them, which hamper the full application of
ontologies in the real world:

   * How to jointly construct an ontology (with a group of people)
   * How to distributively construct an ontology (with people at
     different locations)

These issue have turned out to be the major bottleneck of a
large-scale experiment in distributive ontology construction -called
(KA)2- where an ontology has been developed to model the knowledge
acquisition community.  

The URL of (KA)2's homepage is:
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/broker/KA2.html. The Knowledge
Annotation Initiative of the Knowledge Acquisition Community -(KA)2-
is an initiative that tries to find answers to the above raised
questions.  (KA)2's objective is to develop an ontology that models
the knowledge acquisition community (its researchers, topics,
products, etc.). This ontology will form the basis to annotate WWW
documents of the knowledge acquisition community in order to enable
intelligent access to these documents. (KA)2 is an open
joint-initiative where the participants are actively involved in (i) a
distributive ontological engineering process to model the knowledge
acquisition community (a domain ontology), and (ii) annotating
webpages relevant for the KA community (the instances of the domain
ontology). (KA)2 aims at "intelligent" knowledge retrieval from the
Web and automatic derivation of "new" knowledge. In other words, it
aims at knowledge-based reasoning on the Web, as opposed to the more
usual information retrieval. In (KA)2, we use On2broker's technology
(URL On2broker: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/broker/).

At this workshop, we hope to attract a highly motivated group of
researchers and practitioners working with ontologies. People who
already have been active in (KA)2 are especially invited to
contribute. But also people with relevant and related experience are
warmly welcomed.

We invited all those to submit papers, statements of interests, demos,
memos, etc. on topics including, but not limited to:

   * Raising the level of support to construct ontologies
   * Distributive ontology construction over the Internet
   * Group dynamics and processes in ontology construction
   * Ontological annotation of Webdocuments
        o tool support
        o (semi)automatically
   * Evaluating and extending the current (KA)2 ontology
   * Experiments in using the (KA)2 ontology and annotations
   * Annotation and integration of new interesting web sources
   * Reusability of (parts of) the (KA)2 ontology in other fields

Important dates

Submission deadline: April 20, 1999
Notification: May 2, 1999
Camera Ready: May 10, 1999
This workshop: May 25, 1999
EKAW'99: May 26-29, 1999

Submission procedure:

Authors should email the URL of their contributions to
richard@swi.psy.uva.nl Contributions may be formatted in PDF,
Postscript, MSWord and HTML. There are no restrictions on the
contributions. The proceedings will be made available online on the
Web. A selection of the accepted contributions will be considered for
journal publication.

Organization Committee

Richard Benjamins, University of Amsterdam
Asuncion Gomez Perez, Technical University of Madrid
Dieter Fensel, University of Karlsruhe

General information about EKAW-99

Please refer to the EKAW-99 page for general information on EKAW-99.
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For information, send an email to richard@swi.psy.uva.nl