Ontology Dynamics
ORES 2010 - Call for papers and demos
DEADLINE EXTENDED: March 10, 2010.
The number of ontologies being built and made available for reuse has increased steadily in the last few years. Semantic Web search engines such as Swoogle and Watson currently index several tens of thousands of them. While being a foundation for the Semantic Web, this new environment where ontologies are shared and interlinked online also poses new challenges; fostering thus a number of research projects aiming to understand, amongst others, ontology reuse, storage, publication, retrieval and modularization. Within the context of the Semantic Web ontology repositories should facilitate the sharing and discovery of reusable ontological components (entire ontologies or portions of them).
Illustrating the importance of the problem, significant initiatives are now emerging. One example is the Open Ontology Repositories (OOR) working group set up by the Ontolog community. Within this effort regular virtual meetings are organized and actively attended by ontology experts from around the world; The Ontolog OOR 2008 meeting was held at the National Institute for Standards in Technology (NIST), generating a joint communiqué outlining requirements and paving the way for collaborations. Another example is the Ontology Metadata Vocabulary (OMV) Consortium, addressing metadata for describing ontologies. Despite these initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly supported, such as modularization and versioning, as well as the relationship between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to support the entire ontology lifecycle.
The growing number of online ontologies makes the availability of ontology repositories, in which ontology practitioners can easily find, select and retrieve reusable components, a crucial issue. The recent emergence of several ontology repository systems is a further sign of this. However, in order for these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the realization of ontology repositories in general and to consider explicitly their role in the ontology lifecycle. In addition, it is now critical to achieve interoperability between ontology repositories, through common interfaces, standard metadata formats, etc. ORES10 intends to provide such a forum.
The program of the workshop will included (relatively short) presentations, a panel, as well as an invited talk given by Nigam Shah from the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (www.stanford.edu/~nigam/).
Submitting papers and demos
We want to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the design, development and application of ontology repositories, repository-aware editors, modularization techniques, versioning systems and issues around federated ontology systems. We therefore encourage the submission of research papers, position papers and system descriptions discussing some of the following questions:
- How can ontology repositories “talk” to each other?
- How can the abundant and complex knowledge contained in an ontology repository be made comprehensible for users?
- What is the role of ontology repositories in the ontology lifecycle?
- How can branching and versioning be managed in and across ontology repositories?
- How can ontology repositories interoperate with ontology editors, and other applications and legacy systems?
- How can connections across ontologies be managed within and across ontology repositories?
- How can modularity be better supported in ontology repositories and editors?
- How can ontology repositories and editors use distributed reasoning?
- How can ontology repositories support corporate, national and domain specific semantic infrastructures?
- How do ontology repositories support novel semantic applications?
- What measurements for describing and comparing ontologies can we use? How could ontology repositories use these?
Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages. For system descriptions, a 5 page paper should be submitted. All papers and system descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format. Proceedings of the workshop will be published online. Depending on the number and quality of the submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a poster session.
Submissions can be realized through the easychair system at www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ores2010.
Important dates
- Papers and demo submission: March 1, 2010 extended to March 10, 2010 (23:59 Hawaii Time)
- Notification: April 5, 2010
- Camera ready version: April 18, 2010
- Workshop: May 30 or 31, 2010